He hid the invisible secrets of the world in red
"Love everyone widely, love all people equally without distinction." It is fraternity.
Seemingly abstract and difficult to achieve fraternity, Polish director Křzystov Kieslowski precisely illustrates this theme with Red of the Blue,White-Red Trilogy (hereinafter referred to as "Red").
The story tells the story of Part-time model Valentine, a retired judge, and a young law student, Auguste, who is fatally indissoluble.
Red is heavily used in Red to express the symbolic meaning of "fraternity".
Usually, the symbolic meaning of wanting color is clearly reflected, and it is inevitable that it needs to be exaggerated, and the meaning of color itself should be easy to understand. If you do not understand the symbolic meaning of blue, white and red in the French flag, representing freedom, equality and fraternity respectively, you cannot understand the ubiquitous red in this film.
Even if it is all red, it has different designs and functions in different frames.
The red quilt and dog chain located in the lower left of the picture, the red bag hanging in the left half of the picture have higher saturation, while the red cabinet exposed on the right side is lighter in color. In order to make the composition weight balanced, the director consciously made the left and bottom of the picture thicker and more prominent, which was in line with the audience's viewing habit of looking from left to right and from bottom to top.
In terms of color interaction, red and green complement each other, and Valentine wears a green trench coat in the catwalk scene, but our eyes are not taken away by the model in red next to us. Green can balance the high-energy red, but also make the picture more harmonious and lively.
The distribution and weight of red are directly proportional, and Where Valentine is, it is always filled with a large area of red, and her home, coffee shop, advertising set, bowling alley, and catwalk stage highlight her own fraternal qualities.
In contrast, the red color in the homes of retired judges is sporadic and sparse.
For example, the radio in the picture is the main body, representing the eavesdropping of the retired judge, in addition, we can see the brighter red cup in the lower left corner, and several dark red books.
The picture of the retired judge taking wine out of the bookcase, through the reflection of the mirror, shows a sense of space, but the most eye-catching is the two brightest red lights in the picture. It is implied that the retired judge is not without a little bit of fraternity, he just needs to be "lit up".
The old judge does not leave the house for the first half of the film, and it is not until near the end that he walks out of the house and enters Valentine's stage. At this time, he stood in a large area of red, representing the retired judge who had changed his mood after getting along with Valentine, abandoning eavesdropping, self-reporting, and opening up to agree with Valentine's goodwill.
Not only can color clearly show the emotional changes of the characters, from closed composition to open composition, but also a glimpse of the mood of retired judges. Multiple camera designs allow retired judges to be framed by the entire frame, closed and oppressive and heavy, while the window imagery is also a symbol of voyeurism, which can be referred to Hitchcock's "Rear Window".
Just as he spies on the lives of his neighbors, the camera takes the place of us in voyeurizing his situation; it is worth noting that at the end, when the retired judge learns that Valentine is still alive, standing behind the smashed glass, the broken window happens to be the "exit" of the whole picture, and he is given breathing space with this broken exit.
Hints in color, composition, and detail run through the film. The more you understand the hints, the more you can understand the director's intention in telling the story.
Retired judges' experiences as young were strikingly similar to Augustus's, for example, they were both betrayed by their blonde girlfriends, who gave them identical pens; they liked to play the small movements of the straps; and both had a habit of voyeurism, which was less obvious.
August's only voyeuristic behavior is that he climbed the window to witness his girlfriend's infidelity in the house, but this is an irrational behavior, usually knocking on the door and breaking into the door can be understood, and he risked his life to climb the second floor and almost fell into the air. His paranoid approach of not seeing the truth implies a voyeuristic desire in his heart.
Another hint is that the camera gives a close-up of the CD in the retired judge's home, as Valentin tried to buy at the video store but was preemptively bought by Auguste.
Broken cups and cigarettes not far from Valentine's bowling break up with a young couple eavesdropping on by a retired judge. Against a red background, the scarred cup hints at wounded love.
In addition to giving clues, hints sometimes deliberately give misinformation to confuse the audience. Like the advertising pictorial that fell in the storm, it seems to imply That Valentine's fall in the shipwreck.
The whole film adopts a low-key lighting style, mainly natural light. Valentine's conversations with the retired judge were mostly in the softly lit evening or in the evening when there was only a lamp, and the faces of the two were always half bright and half shadowy, and the picture frame reflected half of her expression. Only when the retired judge recounted that he was eavesdropping on the weather station did the light suddenly brighten up, which was a rare "highlight moment".
Sometimes the film casts into the invisible world, hoping to express something beyond the visible reality through the image.
After the "moral anxiety film" in the 70s and 80s, Kieslowski found French funds and created the romantic "Veronica's Double Life" and successfully transformed, followed by "Blue", "White" and "Red", exploring the humane spirit of life through some small characters.
His documentary says of him: "He went from a practical materialist to a true humanitarian. "
For example, "Red" uses a lot of red, and "Blue" and "White" also use the same color expression method to use blue and white. However, the stories of those two films are relatively easy to understand, and the watchability and mystery of "Red" is the strongest of the three.
The special point is that the heroine of "Red", Elena Jacob, is also the heroine of "Veronica's Double Life". Her performance is very agile, playing two different Veronicas, and the subtle attraction between the two is just right.
At the age of 25, Elena was selected by Kieslowski and played the heroine for the first time. From the stills, it can be seen that Veronica is also very suitable for wearing red, and her skin is white and red. When the director was preparing to shoot "Red", Elena was the perfect candidate. In contrast, Elena's performance in "Red" is more comfortable and mature, fading the youthful girlishness of the "Veronica's Double Life" period.
In the documentary, Kieslowski tells a true story: a man who wakes up at two o'clock in the middle of the night and can no longer sleep, the next day the man's colleague holds up a newspaper to show him, and a singer who looks exactly like him dies in the night.
The director thinks there are a lot of secrets in this world that we haven't seen. "Veronica's Double Life" and "Red" show those secrets, and the two works are also very close in style and tone. Veronica is a similar life form in different spaces. And "Red" is a similar life experience at different times. And the film is a reproduction of these invisible secrets, not a puzzle.
Don't dwell too much on whether August and the retired judge are the same person, they are, and they are not.
There is an old man who throws bottles in the film, and he appears in all three parts.
The heroine of "Blue" is immersed in her own sadness and does not notice the plight of the old man at all; the male protagonist of "White" sees it, but does not want to come forward to help, but just looks at it coldly; In "Red", Valentine sees the old man and immediately comes forward to help.
The three options are intended to discuss different reactions to people in distress. And "Red" must be right?
This brings us back to the core theme and asks, what is fraternity? What kind of behavior can be called fraternity? Is the choice made to make in order to make yourself feel at ease, or not to bear it, fraternity?
Valentine's conversation with the retired judges revolved around the subject, but apparently they did not reach a consistent conclusion. Movies can't give the only answer to any question.
The story begins when Valentine bumps into the retired judge's dog, and he asks her why she wants to save it, and if she doesn't dream of a dead dog in her dreams for her own peace of mind? The choice of conscience is not indispensable. In fact, the theory of sexual goodness in traditional Chinese culture, the core of the exploration is a choice of peace of mind, and it is a question of whether the conscience will hurt if you do bad things.
The story of the retired judge's eavesdropping is more complicated, with men talking to gay people on the phone, wives cooking, and daughters eavesdropping on the phone downstairs. Like the story of the acquitted sailor, the choice of the human spirit and the choice of justice here are exactly at odds.
And Valentine and the retired judge actually made the same decision, and I think their fraternity is flawed, tolerant of error, based on help that does not harm others, perhaps motivated by intolerance or inadvertent action.
One of the answers given by the ending is optimistic, flawless, and fraternal in a broad sense, which is rescue. But the director is still skeptical about the subtleties of the film, trying to explore the complexities of fraternity.
Valentine's advertising set, and the background and expression of the final shipwreck rescue, detailed to the eye are the same, but the final red background is not a piece of cloth, but the red clothes worn by the lifeguards who search for survivors on the spot, which is the red of the rescue.
Six of the seven rescued people are the male and female protagonists of the trilogy, and the remaining one does not know who it is, and that one person can be anyone.
What is important is that she is no longer alone, and her acquaintance with the retired judge, Auguste, seems to have become a variable in their unfortunate cycle. This classic scene is also a sublimation of abstract themes implemented into concrete behavior, completing the trilogy.