Criterion Collection: Three Colors: Blue White Red

*** 11/26/11: ADDED REVIEW OF CRITERION BLU-RAY EDITION ***

The late great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski cleverly "adapted" the three French ideals -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- into three thought-provoking modern-day dramas about people who cope with personal losses and tragedies. In BLUE, the first of the trilogy, a widow tries to set herself free (and gain liberty) from her emotional baggages. The second film, WHITE, is about a jilted man's outrageous plot to get even (thus, equality) with his ex-wife. The last film, RED, which is also Kieslowski's final film before he died in 1996, is about a lonely old man who is embittered by the memories of his youth and finds accidental companionship (fraternity) with a young model. All three films are understated in their tone, economical in their dialogs, elliptical in their editing and plotting (there are some mind-boggling flashbacks and flash forwards in WHITE), and haunting in their atmosphere.

The films regard the three French ideals quite indirectly, and in fact more and more so as the trilogy progresses. BLUE is the only one that deals with the ideal of "freedom" (albeit emotional freedom) in a concrete way, inviting us to ponder its meanings and its attainability. WHITE treats the concept of "equality" in a rather subversive and satiric manner, and it clearly wants us to rethink its meanings rather than accepting it at face value. And RED has to do with "fraternity" only circumstantially, and has more to do with the subject of destiny, and how our past is linked to our present. The three films are set not just in France, but also in Poland and Switzerland, and WHITE has primarily Polish dialogs. Hence, a sort of universality is intended.

The three films are also linked in various ways. All three films involve an unfaithful lover who dies, in one way or another. All three films involve a chance encounter between the distressed protagonist and a sympathetic observer -- the widow and the mistress in BLUE, Karol and Mikolaj in WHITE, the retired judge and the model in RED. Both BLUE and WHITE are about people who move to new surroundings to escape from his or her troubled pasts. And RED, ironically, is about someone who never leaves his home in order to wallow in his self-pity.

Kieslowski had done this sort of thing before. In 1988, he "adapted" the Ten Commandments into ten one-hour, modern-day dramas, collectively titled DECALOGUE, that invite us to rethink the meanings of those principles. In the segment for "Thou Shalt Not Steal," for instance, we witness the kidnapping (the theft) of a child from her adopted parents by her natural mother, who thinks she has a right to her custody. Thus, it turns clear-cut moral ideals into real-world dramas that have no clear-cut solutions or judgments.

The THREE COLORS TRILOGY (as well as DECALOGUE) has the scope and richness that truly earn the films' standing as one of the high points of modern cinematic achievements.

Criterion Blu-ray edition of THREE COLORS offers an improved video transfer over the 2003 Miramax/Buena Vista DVD edition. This is not merely due to the inherent advantage of high-def over standard-def, but also to the fact that Criterion created new remastered transfers that look much better than the old transfers. The Buena Vista edition looks good for its time, but compared to Criterion's effort, the colors often look too warm and saturated, and details in the shadows are often obscured. In a trilogy where colors have great visual significance, the better video representation on the Criterion Blu-ray is much welcome and needed.

Criterion also offers DTS HD-MA 2.0 surround tracks for the three films, but you may need to do a bit of funky adjustments to get them to work. Note that these are 2.0, not 5.1 tracks. Criterion expects you to use Pro Logic Surround decoding on your audio receiver to turn the 2.0 tracks into surround tracks. However, older receivers, like mine, may not be able to apply Pro Logic to DTS audio. So what I did was I had my Blu-ray player first convert the DTS audio into PCM multi-channel audio and pass it to my receiver, and then I was able to apply Pro Logic to the PCM audio. To compound matters, the WHITE disc's surround audio was encoded incorrectly, yielding 1.0 mono after applying Pro Logic. Criterion is currently fixing this problem, and will offer a replacement in December to those who already bought the set. Contact Criterion's point man Jon Mulvaney ( mulvaney@criterion.com ) regarding the replacement. On the BLUE and RED discs, the surround tracks do work, and with much higher bit rate they do sound better than the surround tracks on the Buena Vista discs.

The fully-loaded Criterion set contains several new supplements, but is also missing a quite a few extras on the Buena Vista set.

Bad news first. The wonderful full-length audio commentaries by film professor Annette Insdorf on the Buena Vista set are gone. Also gone are most of the interviews done by MK2 (producer Marin Karmitz's company) in 2001, with actresses Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Irene Jacob, editor Jacques Witta (for BLUE), and Karmitz (for BLUE and WHITE). Most of the MK2 featurettes are also gone: "A Discussion on Kieslowski's Later Years", "A Discussion on Working with Kieslowski", "Behind the Scenes of White with Kieslowski", and "Behind the Scenes of Red with Kieslowski". Selected scenes commentaries by Delpy and Jacob are also gone. Also noticeably missing are two student films by Kieslowski: "Concert of Wishes" and "The Office". All these valuable video and audio extras are NOT on the Criterion set. Needless to say, those who have the Buena Vista set should probably hold on to it.

The Criterion set does retain some of the old extras. It does have several of the MK2 featurettes: "Kieslowski's Early Years", "Reflections on BLUE" (featuring the cast and crew, Insdorf, film critic Geoff Andrew, and film director Agnieszka Holland), Marin Karmitz's interview for RED, and Jacques Witta's interview for RED. It has Binoche's selected scenes commentary for BLUE. All the wonderful "cinema lessons" by Kieslowski are also retained. The footage of Kieslowski announcing his retirement at Cannes also, thankfully, survived the cut. Also retained are two of Kieslowski's student films, "The Tram" and "The Face", although the picture quality of "The Tram" is noticeably worse than that on the Buena Vista DVD, with more print damage and a much darker picture.

The all-new extras offered by Criterion are all excellent. Each film comes with a 22-minute "video essay", done by Insdorf for BLUE, film critic Tony Rayns for WHITE, and film writer Dennis Lim for RED. These segments are essentially audio commentaries with film clips and stills. While they are well-written and informative, they seem a little too terse, due to their short lengths, compared to Insdorf's full-length commentaries for the Buena Vista DVDs.

There are new interviews with composer Zbigniew Preisner, actors Delpy, Jacob, and Zbigniew Zamachowski, and screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Criterion usually does great interviews, and these are no exception. They are all more in-depth and comprehensive than their MK2 counterparts. They were all shot in 2011. Ten years after they were interviewed by MK2, their enthusiasm and admiration for Kieslowski's work are apparently unchanged.

There are also three wonderful documentaries not on the Buena Vista set. The 16-minute "Seven Women of Different Ages" (1978) shows seven ballet dancers in each day of the week, from a little ballerina to an old ballet teacher, subtly depicting the journey of a dancer and of life itself. "Talking Heads" (1980), running 12 minutes, interviews several people in the order of their ages about who they are and what they want to be; it brings to mind Michael Apted's UP documentaries. And there is a 1-hour documentary made for Danish TV in 1995 called "Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-So", where the just-retired director reminisces about his career, from his early films to his later masterpieces, and we hear many of his pessimistic views about art, life, and politics. He concludes the film by saying, "To know is not my job. Not knowing is."

The Criterion set also offers a fairly substantial 75-page booklet that includes a 18-page excerpt from the book "Kieslowski on Kieslowski" as well as interviews of the three cinematographers of THREE COLORS. The last page of the booklet also mentions the fact that Pro Logic is needed to hear surround sound, as I mentioned above.

Yes, this Criterion Blu-ray edition is a pricey set, and, unlike the Buena Vista edition, the three films are not sold separately. But the strength of the video and audio qualities and the comprehensive supplements still make this a worthy purchase.

Around here, red, white and blue are known as the colours of the American flag, and they are also the colours of the French flag. But they also are the names of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski's brilliant "Three Colours" trilogy, which has a delicacy that most directors can only dream of. Beautiful, painful, artfully shot, it's a visual feast for anyone who has an appreciation for beauty, subtlety and filmmaking.

In "Bleu," Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche) and her family are in a car accident when their brakes fail, and her husband and daughter are killed. Devastated, she leaves her palatial house in the country after a night with her husband's old friend Olivier (Benoît Régent), who has been in love with her for years. And though Julie tries to leave her old life behind, she is pulled in when Olivier starts to finish her husband's last composition -- and he tells her of a side of her husband that she never knew.

In the bitterly funny "Blanc," hairdresser Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is being coldly divorced by his beautiful wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) because she is sexually dissatisfied with him -- and she takes all his money too. But after returning to Poland, Karol rebuilds his life and fortune, and amid a web of killing, seduction and faked death, he comes up with a way to get back at Dominique...

And "Rouge" is the color of love. On her way home from a modelling session, Valentine (Irene Jacob) accidently injures a pregnant dog. The owner is Joseph Kern, (Jean-Louis Trintignant) an embittered ex-judge whose job has left him spiritually adrift, and who now spends his time wiretapping the phones of his neighbors and predicting what will happen in their lives. The friendship between Valentine and Kern grows, even as a young man's current life mirrors what devastated Kern long ago...

The three colours of the French flag symbolize liberty, equality and fraternity -- and these are echoed in the stories of Kieslowski's films. And each of the three movies has its own "feel" -- "Blue" is cool and sensual, "White" was sharp and sexy, and "Red" has a sweetness and richness that is truly moving.

And while most directors are just boring when they do slow, arty direction, Kieslowski infused his direction with sensual beauty and endless light and colour, like a painting come to life. And he intertwined many symbolic images and lingering threads from one movie to the next, whether it's an old lady recycling bottles or a rather surprising finale for "Red" that brings all three movies' protagonists together.

And he saturated the movies with the colour of their title -- blue is sadness, depth and beauty; white is beautiful and pure, stark and blinding; red is passion and warmth. While this may not have been Kieslowski's intention, the constant presence of these colors (a bridal gown, a swimming pool, and so on) add an extra dimension to the emotions in the story, especially the first.

Juliette Binoche is an extremely good actress, and this movie uses her expressiveness as most movies don't. Zamachowski brings an element of humanity and poignancy to what could have been an idiotic character, and I never felt anything but understanding for this guy. And Irene Jacob brings a sweetness and innocence to her role as Valentine (aptly named, considering the title of the movie she stars in) that is rarely seen in modern movies.

In fact, this trilogy was ripe for a Criterion Collection release, and as usual they're lavishing extras on it -- high-def restorations; improved English subtitles; commentary by Juliette Binoche; interviews with actresses, writers, critics, producers and composers; video essays, a few short films and documentaries by Kieslowski, a feature-length documentary on Kieslowski, and the usual booklet of essays and printed interviews.

Kieslowski was an unusual and extremely talented moviemaker, and his "Three Colors" trilogy -- "Bleu," "Blanc" and "Rouge" -- is an exceptional piece of work. We shall not see his like again.

The movies are masterpieces and there is no need to add anything to reviews you can find all over the net. Easily top movies of the 1990s.

However this Criterion release has serious faults. Blue is misframed. In one scene you can even see microphone getting into the frame, but the whole movie is affected (not just select scenes). White has an audio fault, where the encoded surround will not play properly. Criterion has released corrected White disc, however it is unclear if the Amazon stock has been replaced with the corrected one. While Criterion has acknowledged the framing issue in Blue, there is no word on the corrected release. Apparently the error was made by a company who prepared the master - the issue also applies to the UK release by Artifical Eye based off the same master. Everybody interested in the movie should contact Criterion and ask them to correct the issue. These are masterpieces and deserve proper transfers and not botched ones.

By the way, there are now some reports online that now the set comes with Blue disc misprinted as "Secret Sunshine" DVD, however it indeed contains Blue (however misframed). Someone is really not doing their job right at Criterion.

UPDATE: apparently now Criterion refuses to admit it's a problem, much less fix it, and says "it's artistic choice". Boooooo, Criterion. Artistic choices are made by film's authors, not some knob turners in the scanning room.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 12 reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars