Aaah yes,...Kieslowski, where do I begin.
I have seen his understated gems:
3 colors, Red, blue and white. They are 3 films with 3 individual storylines and 3 different protaganists, but with one underlying motif that becomes clear only with the last film,
Red. Together they make for highly layered, deeply moving accounts of 3 women who go through 3 different experiences in their life: Death, infidelity and renewed life. While all of it sounds pretentious, it is anything but. It is lyrical and touching.
Kieslowski was convinced that as a filmaker he was the God of the world he created and this shows in every frame of his work. In
Blue you expect the beautiful juliette binoche (Cache, English patient) to be awoken from her misery following the death of her husband, by the sound of the director edging her into an abyss of sadness and self pity; that is the amount of creative energy in every scene of his films. His use of colors from the films titles in nearly every frame of the individual films is also an achivement. A lot of glass and water is used in
Blue, snow, fur coats etc in
white and indoor opera houses, wine etc in
Red. The use of colors is ofcourse allegorical as well and has enough juice in its implications to keep a student of cinema discussing their importance for weeks. The same technique was later also used to great effect in
Hero but here they are more purposeful, since they not only drive the story forward, they also serve as a reminder of places, people and events past.
I have also seen the Krzysztof Kieslowski scripted (but not directed)
Heaven[/b], a film of such ethereal beauty all the way upto its unfitting ending, that to this day it remains on top of my list of films that I wish I could remake. Perhaps if the director himself had made the film, it would have had a completely different outcome, but he died before he could begin shooting.
Kieslowski was a highly experimental director, whose technique and craft have now been moulded into works of many other popular filmakers, most notably Innaratu (21 grams, Ammores Perros) and his use of a world connected by the actions of random individuals. His work is also not for all tastes. His drama remains inaccessible to most because of its reliance on moral and ethical implications of people and their actions. This is how Ebert described Blue in his opening paragraph of the review:
There is a kind of movie in which the characters are not thinking about anything. They are simply the instruments of the plot. And another kind of movie in which we lean forward in our seats, trying to penetrate the mystery of characters who are obviously thinking a great deal. BLUE is the second kind of film: The story of a woman whose husband dies, and who deals with that fact in unpredictable ways.
Because of these factors, his movies can sometimes seem like they are going nowhere, but they are very pure works of art and feature conclusions that leave you staggering in their complexity and grandeur.
