Red

Being a Chinese means that red is a color with thick and complex inscribed meanings;a lot of times, it is a color that carries itself with imposition and even oppression. So heavy cultural connotation, both good and bad - nationalism, culturalism, revolution, folk, and the chauvinist idea that red is a woman's color. I always run away from red as much as possible. There is no single piece of red in my closet, for that's a color I can't personalize and manipulate.

I firstly watched the movie "Red" during my teenage hood. For the first time, red seemed to be such a warm and sensational color. The French girl against the red drop can be so real and pretty. I didn't understand much of the movie at the time. And last night, when I was trying to watch it again, after the amusing presidential debate, with a challenging academic book in hand, I sadly found that I've not moved too much from the time when I was a teenager.

I did, however, enjoy greatly reading Ebert's review on the Kieslowski's Tricolor afterwords. Once again, sadly, as visual images don't force a single interpretation by sparing use of language, I was not able to come up with my own understanding. Ebert's description endows a significant level of specificity by giving a live consciousness to the movie.

Here are some quotes that I really like:
"As a young man this judge was was once in love, lost that love, and has lived on hold ever since. He all but caresses his emotional wounds. Although at first he rudely turns Valentine away, slowly he begins to tell her his story. There is a moment in "Red" where Valentine leans forward to listen with such attention and sympathy that she seems at prayer. Only gradually do we learn that the story of the judge and his lost love reveals parallels with the story of Valentine and her lover who is always absent, and with the life of a young law student who lives across from her apartment in the city--a student she has never met.

On another timeline, in a parallel universe, the judge and Valentine might have themselves fallen in love. They missed being the same age by only 40 years or so. Now that Hubble has seen back to the dawn of time, that doesn't seem a great many years. There is a passage in one of Loren Eiseley's books where he climbs down a crevice in the desert and finds himself looking at the skull of one of man's early descendants, who gazes back at him over countless centuries. He reflects that from a cosmological perspective, they lived at almost the same instant."

-- I actually think Wang Kar-Wai does a better job in presenting various impossibilities and barriers of time and space. =P

"In the trilogy, "Blue" is the anti-tragedy, "White" is the anti-comedy, and "Red" is the anti-romance. All three films hook us with immediate narrative interest. They are metaphysical through example, not theory: Kieslowski tells the parable but doesn't preach the lesson. It's the same with his "Decalogue," where each film is based on one of the Ten Commandments, but it is not always possible to say which commandment, or precisely what the film is saying about it. I know this because I taught "The Decalogue" in a film class, where we discovered that the order of the commandments differs slightly in the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant versions. "And in the Kieslowski version," a student sighed.

In the same elusive way, using symbolism that only seems to be helpful, "Blue," "White" and "Red" stand for the three colors of the French tricolor, representing liberty, equality and fraternity. Juliette Binoche, in "Blue," has the liberty, after her loss of husband and child, to start life again, or not at all. Zbigniew Zamachowski, in "White," is dropped by his beautiful wife (Julie Delpy) after he goes to a great deal of trouble to move her to Paris. Back home in Poland, he wants to make millions so that he can be her equal, and have his revenge. Valentine and the old judge in "Red" have a fraternity of souls that springs across barriers of time and gender because they both have the imagination to appreciate what could have been.

There is also, lurking unsaid, the possibility that this Prospero, so intent on studying the lives of his neighbors without involving himself, might be the catalyst for one final act of magic involving Valentine and that young man who lives across from her. That young man who might have been him, or, this being Kieslowski, might actually be him, his timelines overlapping slightly and specific details of course altered by circumstances.

The Columbia University professor and film critic Annette Insdorf, who knew Kieslowski well and often translated for him, says, "It's rare that you say about some film director, 'What a good man.' But he was. Very by-the-way, emotional, very non-sentimental, dry in his wit and in his bearing, but he really made an impression." Her book, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, provides the key to his work in its title. Kieslowski almost never made a film about characters who lacked choices. Indeed, his films were usually about their choices, how they arrived at them, and the close connections they made or missed."

Stories are about lives. That is the difference between films for children and films for adults. Kieslowski celebrates intersecting timelines and lifelines, choices made and unmade. All his films ask why, since God gave us free will, movie directors go to such trouble to take it away. "Kieslowski truly loved his characters and invites us into a poignant awareness of both our limitations and our capacity for transcendence," Insdorf says, and you can feel that in the tenderness of every frame. The old judge in "Red" is harsh and dismissive, but with the sense that it hurts him, not entertains him, to treat Valentine so harshly. We see him like so many of Kieslowski's characters, swimming upward through a suffocating life toward the possibility that hope still floats somewhere above.

I connect strongly with Kieslowski because I sometimes seek a whiff of transcendence by revisiting places from earlier years. I am thinking now of a cafe in Venice, a low cliff overlooking the sea near Donegal, a bookstore in Cape Town and Sir John Soane's breakfast room in London. I am drawn to them in the spirit of pilgrimage. No one else can see the shadows of my former and future visits there, or know how they are the touchstones of my mortality, but if some day as I approach the cafe, I see myself just getting up to leave, I will not be surprised to have missed myself by so little."
--This is such an aesthetic project. I often feel the same way.