Krzysztof Kieślowski completed his Three Colours trilogy with what was to be his final film. With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.
At its centre is Valentine, played by Irène Jacob, a model who has a job posing for a chewing gum billboard campaign; her image is to dominate the city streets and she briefly achieves a kind of anonymous celebrity – a part of the story which makes Three Colours: Red a New Wave sort of film. During the shoot, the photographer had sensed that she should pose with a desperately sad expression in dramatic profile, with wet-looking hair, against a vivid red background. This is explained by the surreally calamitous ending which also ties up threads from the first two movies, Blue and White, in ways that might seem glib but have their own strange impact.
