In celebration of a film genius: Kieslowski

Cinema being one of my passions, I think it is about time to remind myself and receptive readers of the manner in which the Polish-French director, Krzysztof Kieslowski — who died some years ago — has enriched the lives of cinema lovers everywhere through his work.

Some people may wonder how film, which is mostly regarded as a popular source of entertainment, could enrich one’s life. The fact is that cinema is capable, perhaps more than most other art forms, of drawing viewers into a fictional realm so powerfully that one experiences it as if one is participating in events together with the characters populating the narrative space of cinema. Few directors have succeeded in this as well as Kieslowski, mainly because of his ability and willingness — so different from the average Hollywood movie, which is committed to the feel-good, kitsch goal of the invariably happy ending — to home in on everyday situations in the lives of ordinary, non-glamorous people. There he uncovers all the drama, pain and joy, as well as the rewards and consolations of love that are usually associated with the lugubrious, yet saccharine, lives of soap-opera characters; only in Kieslowski’s treatment of these familiar human phenomena they attain an authenticity that they could never have in soapies.

Needless to say, unless one has personally (as I am fortunate to have) experienced the healing power of love, it would not be quite as convincing or visually as well as linguistically enriching for viewers to become part of the world of Julie, in the first of Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, namely Blue. Julie loses her husband and young daughter in a car crash, and, because she does not want to live without them, tries to commit suicide, but finds herself incapable of doing so — something poignantly conveyed in a scene where she tries to take a handful of sleeping pills, only to find that she cannot bring herself as far as swallowing them. In the course of ridding herself of all the possessions that irresistibly remind her of her family, she unavoidably encounters Olivier, her dead husband’s former colleague and fellow composer, who has always loved Julie, albeit from a distance. Being aware of Olivier’s love for her, she invites him over to her Paris apartment before selling it, and sleeps with him, only to inform him, the next morning, that having shown him that she, too, is only human, with all the skin blemishes and other defects that all women have, she is leaving.

Julie buys another apartment in a different part of the city, and in the course of the unfolding narrative one learns just to what extent she is unable to resist connecting with the people around her, despite her attempts not do so because of her lingering sadness — including a prostitute who needs her help, as well as her deceased husband, Patrice’s newly discovered pregnant mistress, Sandrine. In the case of the latter, who is carrying Patrice’s child, Julie is naturally upset about having been ignorant of the affair, but she nevertheless not only forgives Sandrine, but gives her the villa where she, Patrice and their daughter used to live, so that Sandrine and the child would have a suitable place to live.

Moreover, because she was made aware of Sandrine’s existence through something that Olivier said in a television interview on the composition that Patrice had been working on at the time of his death, she phones him and simply asks him whether he loves her. To his affirmative reply, she responds by joining him, and one witnesses Julie and Olivier, at last making love in a manner commensurate with her new-found ability to receive love, too, instead of only giving it, as she did so generously when Patrice was still alive, even to the point where, it is revealed, she was the true composer behind his most celebrated works, without ever claiming the credit for it.

Throughout the film Kieslowski employs various shades and hues of blue to convey the moods and feelings associated with it, such as sadness, hope, spirituality and the like, but without ever crossing the line separating great film art and sentimentalist kitsch. The same is true of the other two members of the Three Colour trilogy, namely White and Red, where these respective colours play an integral part in constituting the very soul of these films.

In passing, I should mention that the Three Colours trilogy comprises Kieslowski’s tribute to what the French Tricolour (national flag) symbolises, namely the values of the French revolution of the 18th century, to wit Liberty (Blue), Equality (White) and Fraternity or Friendship (Red). Each film may be read as elaborating on these themes in the form of a cinematic answer to a question. Blue, for example, elaborates on the question, “Is it possible to be free without love?” And it comes up with a negative answer to its constitutive interrogation, as do the other two members of the trilogy.

In the case of White, the question is: “Can there be equality without shared power?” And in Red — perhaps the most beautiful of the three — it is: “Can there be friendship without communication?” Kieslowski’s film-length answers to these questions are persuasive and deeply philosophical — in the case of White in the guise of the struggle of a disempowered (to the point of sexual impotence) husband to regain personal power (that is, equality) vis-á-vis his estranged wife to be able to win back her love, and in that of Red the development of an unlikely friendship between a retired judge and a beautiful young model in the context of the problematic character of communication between people generally and lovers in particular.

It still boggles the mind that Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — good cinema as it is — beat Red for the top prize at the Cannes film festival in 1994, as there is no question in my mind as to which is the better film. Kieslowski’s cinematic mastery at employing audiovisual imagery in complex ways for both the evocation of mood and the generation of progressively (that is, prospectively and retrospectively) modifying meaning(s), while it simultaneously functions as extended metaphorical lens for scrutinising social life in the late 20th century, is virtually unmatched in cinema. Tarantino’s genius at surprising (if not shocking) audiences with unexpected image-sequences notwithstanding, he is, in my humble opinion, no match for Kieslowski’s penchant for eliciting the most profound insights from images of the ordinary.

A case in point is a scene-sequence in Blue, where Julie (Juliette Binoche) is sitting in a restaurant, pensively dipping the inevitably French sugar cube in her coffee. Kieslowski’s camera leads one’s gaze to the symbolically pertinent manner in which the cube, without being fully immersed in the coffee, visibly absorbs the liquid until it is saturated. To every attentive viewer this simple image captures Julie’s life-enhancing quality of pervading the space of those around her with her unobtrusively loving nature, like the coffee permeating the sugar cube. And through images such as this one, one is able to recognise such unconditionally loving people in one’s own life — cinema, like all good art, bathes life in a new and revealing light.

Perhaps the best and most lasting of Kieslowski’s cinematic legacy, however, is his monumental interpretation of the Ten Commandments in a series made for Polish television, tersely titled the Decalogue. Free interpretations of the continuing relevance of these lapidary Old Testament imperatives, each of these approximately hour-long films captures the fundamental moral significance of idolatry (in this case, of the computer), of murder (in what is probably the most harrowing of the ten cinematic masterpieces), envy, marital infidelity, theft, and so on, without ever losing sight of the inescapable humanity and fallibility of the people involved.

In other words, Kieslowski’s camera holds a discernful moral-religious mirror up to the social world, and shows viewers images of individuals’ actions in which we (sometimes with startling realisation) may recognise ourselves, in the process being reminded that none of us can afford to be arrogant and unforgiving to those who have wronged us. On the contrary.

And the miraculous thing about the way he achieves it is that it does not require the Hollywood myth of guaranteed happy endings to convince viewers that joy is just as accessible to us as pain is unavoidable. These events of countervailing human experiences are brought to audiences with such a clarity of vision (similar to, although I would argue less tortured than, that of Ingmar Bergman) that anyone who fails to look at him — or herself with greater understanding, subsequent to being touched by Kieslowski’s transformative cinematic wizardry, must surely be insensitive as a human being. We are truly fortunate that Kieslowski has left us his legacy of cinematic art — it illuminates the human condition for those interested in self-understanding.