The Trois Coleurs trilogy may be a cinematic milestone, but it could also mark the end of Kieslowski's career as a director. Since he completed the work earlier this year, he has repeteadly told critics and interviewers that he doesn't want to make any more films.
The production timetable for the three films was very much set with the intention of their being premiered a three successive major festivals: Bleu in Venice in September 1993 (where it shared the Golden Lion with Altman's Short Cuts , Blanc in Berlin in February of this year (where it won the Silver Bear for Best Director) and Rouge in Cannes in May (where, to the biggest outcry since Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice was passed over, it failed to win anything at all - other, that is, than rave reviews).
The tone varies enormously between the three films. Bleu is the emotionally harrowing but ultimately uplifting tale of a woman (Juliette Binoche) cutting all feeling out of her life after her daughter and husband are killed in an accident. Blanc is an ironic comedy about a Polish exile's return home to an almost unrecognisable homeland after his marriage falls apart. And Rouge deals with the meeting and, against all odds, the friendship between a young woman (Irene Jacob, star of Kieslowski's only non-multiparter of recent years, La double vie de Veronique and an embittered retired judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant.
The world that Kieslowski depicts, however, for all that the majority of the trilogy is set in Western Europe, is shot through with the resignation, irony and, occasionally, the sentimentality of Eastern Europe, melded together into a style and tone which seems to have captured the psychological state of a continent in the final decade of the century, with its sense of loss and its search for trascendence.
Only time will tell whether or not Kieslowski's announcement of his retirement from filmaking is another example of the kind of dark irony with which much of the trilogy - and nearly all of Blanc - is permeated. Let's hope not. Before the mid-1980's, only the most dedicated film buffs knew Kieslowski's work. After the mid-1990's, it is hard to imagine European cinema without it.
An article in Moving Pictures, 17/18 September, 1994.