THREE COLORS — FAKE LOVE — TRUE HYPOCRISY

KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI THE THREE COLOURS TRILOGY — 1993–94

The three films together in a trilogy are dealing with hypocrisy in life and the punishment for it.

In BLUE, a very successful composer dies with his daughter in a car accident and his wife survives because a witness helps her, and only her, out of the car. The husband was still alive, but the witness did not help him. No indication about the girl. The widow decides to get rid of everything from her husband, to destroy his career. But she discovers he has had a mistress, and this mistress is pregnant with a boy. She changes her strategy and recuperates everything to enable the mistress to raise the son within the context of his father and his widow, I guess, but also within the author’s rights of the father. She is not really punishing her husband, but she is making him pay and everything right that he did not make right initially. She even reconstitutes an important piece of music for some European celebration that she had tried to destroy at first and delivers it to another composer for him to finish it and arrange what had been done already.

In WHITE, a Polish male hairdresser marries a French female hairdresser. The wife does not get enough consummation of the marriage. She requires and obtains a divorce. Then the man goes back to Poland, develops some illegal business, and is successful. Then he organizes his death and burial, and his will gives everything to his ex-wife. She accepts and comes to Poland for the burial. The ex-husband reappears in her life, consummates the wedding, and disappears again. Then the ex-husband, under a fake identity, lets the police know about the illegal business and she ends up in prison in Poland.

In RED, a student and advertising model in Geneva nearly kills a dog and brings her back to her owner who rejects both the girl and the dog. The girl takes the dog to a veterinarian and then brings her back to the owner. She discovers he is spying on his neighbors’ telephone calls. She clearly says she disagrees with this practice. He then goes to the police, denounces himself, and ends up in court since the…