Friday's Words: If you played the "Soul Fighting Music" of the Nintendo game as a child, you may know the secret passage of the fifth level - the old mother will have a soldier running back before she appears, and if you can turn around and follow him, he will take you to another space, to another game world... I've only succeeded once or twice in my life, and that wonderful feeling is not to mention how exciting it is. What I didn't expect was that this wonderful feeling, many years later, could be obtained in Kieslowski's "Blue, White and Red Trilogy". Yes, there are "secret passages" hidden there. This passage not only can take you to different spaces, but it can also help you interpret something different. Next, we will explore this "secret passage" together.
First, the relationship between the three films of blue, white and red
The Blue, White and Red Trilogy consists of three films in a series, arranged in order of Blue, White, and Red.
"Blue" is about the wife of a French musician who regains her life after losing her husband and children; "White" is about a Polish immigrant who returns to China to start a business after being repatriated in France; and the last "Red" is about a Swiss female model working in France and a retired judge.
At first glance, the three films seem to tell three completely unrelated stories. The only thing we can be sure of is that all three stories basically take place in or are related to France. So is there any other connection between the other three films, or why did the director include three stories as a series?
I think the best entry point to solve this problem is the "secret passage"!
Careful viewers will surely notice the "wearing place" of the two films "Blue" and "White".
When the musician's wife in "Blue" goes to the courthouse to find her husband's former lover, she stumbles into a trial scene and is quickly chased out by security guards. And the case shown at the trial scene that the director gave us a glimpse of in just a few seconds was the cause and beginning of another "White" story—a divorce case in which a Polish man who had married a French wife was a man. And it was this divorce decision that put him in the position of being frozen and deported.
So, we learned the whole process of the case head-on at the scene of the trial at the beginning of the movie "White". Of course, the process was accompanied by a scene of the musician's wife mistakenly entering the scene and being invited out.
▲ The "wearing gang" shot in "The White of the Blue,White and Red Trilogy"
Thus, this court and the door of the court are the "secret passages" connecting the three spatial stories.
Speaking of this, some people probably have to question: no, that secret passage connects the first two stories, and it seems that it has nothing to do with the third "Red"!
Indeed, I don't seem to find any more secret passages to "wear gangs" in "Red". But let's not overlook one of the biggest clues: the third "Red" is full of things related to the "court" - from the female model bumping into the old judge's dog, to the emotional entanglement of the young student who applied for the judge's certificate with his girlfriend, to the old judge's eavesdropping behavior and experience memories... The whole of "Red" revolves around the axis of "court".
In addition, through the shipwreck at the end of "Red", we can also determine one thing: the three stories and the characters involved are in the same social context of the same era, in other words, they share a "court".
After seeing the fact that "one channel connects three stories", we can probably make a systematic summary of the relationship between the "blue, white and red trilogy": "Blue" and "White" show two angles in a social context; and "Red" is a summary and induction of the ideas of the first two films.
So what is the overall thinking and ideological thrust of the Blue,White-Red Trilogy?
With the above arguments and questions, let's go back to the character characteristics of the story and find answers from them.
Second, the identity characteristics of the characters in the three movies of blue, white and red
Let's take a look at the protagonists in three movies:
The protagonist in "Blue" is a middle-aged woman with a successful career, she is the wife of a musician, and she is also a quasi-artist (she has participated in many of her husband's works). Naturally, her financial situation is not bad - there are real estate, there are savings, there are connections, there are high-class friends... Finding a job is even less of a problem! She is a middle-class child.
The male protagonist in "White" is different, he looks like a wolf, he will not have any elegant art, he will only shave his head; this is not nothing, the most important thing is that he is not a local, he is a door-to-door son-in-law, upside down, a little bad service to his wife there is a risk of being kicked out of the door. He is at best a blue-collar mechanic, and he has to come out unless he is speculators.
There are three protagonists in "Red" to be precise: a Swiss female model, a retired old judge, and a young man (also Swiss) who applied for a judge.
The female model is a migrant worker in the city, saying that it is not good to eat some youth rice. Through her family and her residence, we can know that her family is not very well-off, and her life is relatively poor; as for the old judge and the young man who examined the judge, in fact, this is about a person or a type of person (through the overlap of the experiences of the old judge and the young man), they are also the kind of people who rely on their own hard work to obtain an official and a half-job, and their social status is probably in the middle of the protagonists of "Blue" and "White".
As a result, the identities of the characters in the three films just arrange the three classes of French society: middle class, blue collar, and dick silk.
This is of course the director's elaborate layout! If you look closely, you will find that the director is everywhere around this layout to show the character of the character -
Three, three movie protagonists to "the old man who threw garbage cans" (channel A)
In the three movies of "Blue, White and Red", in addition to the court, there is also a scene of "the old man throwing garbage bottles into the garbage can". Of course, this is another "secret channel", but this one does not play the role of connection, but the role of "experiment". What is the experiment? It's like throwing a bone at three different animals and watching how they react. This experiment is really interesting, and you can decipher a lot of things from it. Let's look at the reactions of the protagonists in the three stories of blue, white, and red:
The female artist in "Blue" sits on the side of the road with her eyes closed in the sun, and the music blown by street performers is heard outside the painting, and the camera is cut to a hunchbacked old lady who struggles to stuff a bottle into the garbage can. Notice how the female artist reacts to the old lady who throws the garbage: there is no reaction (or the female artist does not notice the old lady at all)! Two things completely isolated, you throw your trash, I bask in my sun and listen to my music.
The Dicks Pole in "White" is slightly different, after he has eaten a lawsuit and fallen into the street, he finds the old man who throws garbage, and reacts with an expression - a smile (i don't know whether it is a mockery or a self-deprecating laugh). Of course, that's all his reaction.
The female model in "Red" has an essential performance after discovering the old man who threw the bottle - she finally went to help the old man stuff the bottle into the trash. Attention to detail: The bottle makes a smashing sound after being stuffed into the bin (sound close-up).
Well, in the face of the experiment of the old man who throws garbage, the reaction of three people can not be more obvious, which is a good metaphor for the reaction of three people of different social classes (identities) to social responsibility:
Middle-class female artists show indifference and indifference;
The bottom dick man showed ridicule and ignoring it;
The working female models showed enthusiastic help, but they backfired and were unable to do so.
Yes, this is the Time France that director Kieslowski shows, a France full of social problems such as pensions, immigration, race, social class, etc. In the face of these problems, what kind of social responsibility should everyone bear, I think this is one of the questions that the film wants to provoke us to think about.
Looking back at the female artist in "Blue", her first reaction after a car accident and the loss of a loved one is to escape and forget. But does that work?
The memories triggered by those around her were like creditors constantly harassing her like creditors collecting debts. It is not so much that memory is collecting debts, but rather that society is asking these rich people for "responsibility" debts. So we see that the female artist finally found the lover of the husband who worked in the court, and even eventually took on the alimony of Xiao San and his illegitimate son.
Of course, this way of solving social problems is just a hypothesis in "Blue".
IV. The "Shipwreck" (Channel C)
At the end of the last red of the Blue,White-Red Trilogy, there was a shipwreck. There were only seven survivors on the shipwreck, including all the protagonists in the three films, as well as the protagonist's male and girlfriend. Of course, you can think of this setup as an "Easter egg" or as a "magic realism" party. But I think it has a deeper metaphor.
To interpret this metaphor, we must return to the "secret passage" -
I remember that Kore-eda had this sentence in "The Third Degree Suspect":
Everybody's sitting on a ship called Justice...
If I think of the ship in "Red" as "justice," it is clear that the seven men who were shipwrecked on this "ship of justice" were lucky, and a minority! This is also extremely unbalanced and unfair in the developed countries of the West.
And this imbalance does not necessarily lie in natural disasters, but in man-made. Look at the old retired judge's memories of how he passed the judge's exam when he was young because he accidentally fell to the ground (the exam book fell to the ground, and the page that just turned over was something to be tested the next day). But he did not use this right given by God to carry out the social responsibility of the application. The outcome of a judicial trial depends entirely on a judge's subjective consciousness and emotions...
Looking at the Blue,White-Red Trilogy, I think it excels in the "secret passages" that weave through the three stories. It not only opens a door for the audience to think deeply about social issues, but also opens up a new way to explain film ideas, which opens up a broader space and level of film, so that moviegoers are full of mystery and surprise in the process of deep thinking.