Having recently decided to haul my philistinic ass into the 21st century by buying a Blu-ray player, I decided that something I could do with is actual Blu-ray discs to play on it. Otherwise it would just be an expensive footrest, and not even a very good one. A pathetic plea on Twitter to anyone who fancied sending me some for free yielded surprising results (i.e. nobody told me to piss off), and thanks to
Organic Marketing I am now the owner of Krzysztof Kieślowski's
Three Colours Trilogy on Blu-ray, which I have shamefully never seen.
The gift was made with the perfectly reasonable proviso that I say something about the trilogy's impending release on
The Incredible Suit, and I promised faithfully to do so before sticking the discs in a drawer and forgetting all about them for several weeks.
Some time later later someone at Organic (hi Will) gently pointed out that the release date for the trilogy had been and gone without so much as a whisper from me (obviously nobody's going to buy it without my recommendation), and so I resolved to do something about it immediately. The thing is, who's got time to watch three films in a row these days? Nobody, that's who. So I decided to make my life easier by watching the first ten minutes of
Three Colours: Blue, the middle ten minutes of
Three Colours: White and the final ten minutes of
Three Colours: Red in order to save all that boring actual watching of entire films.
Yep, The Guardian may have liveblogged the whole trilogy over three nights in November (
here,
here and
here), but
The Incredible Suit is going one step further by reducing a recognised genius' magnum opus to half an hour of ill-informed and embarrassingly late wittering. Here are my findings.
Three Colours: Blue
The trilogy opens with a camera bolted to the underside of a moving car and blurred streetlights flashing across a blue-hued frame before the car drives into a tree and
an obvious metaphor a colourful beach ball bounces away, suggesting some kind of end of childhood or innocence or something. Every shot is gorgeous - a close-up reflection in an eye is astonishing - and before the first ten minutes are up I'm already blubbing as the car crash's only survivor, hospitalised, watches her family's funeral on a tiny monitor and strokes the screen where her daughter's coffin is. I immediately want to abandon my experiment and watch the rest but RULES IS RULES.
Three Colours: White
Plunging myself into the middle of the middle film of the trilogy, I find myself listening to some men talking in Polish about a building development on virgin countryside. I'm flummoxed but struck by the enormous amount of whiteness on screen - a character's vest, the sky, a map, all whiter than a party at John Wayne's house. I suspect that this may be deliberate and am busy admiring Kieślowski for his artistic synergy when someone suddenly produces a gun. In the film I mean, not in my front room. Shit just got real and I immediately want to abandon my experiment again and watch the rest but RULES IS STILL RULES.
Three Colours: Red
I boot up the final ten minutes of the trilogy and am immediately smacked in the chops by the largest amount of obvious redness in production design since I saw
We Need To Talk About Kevin. Before I've had a chance to bang on about Kieślowski's artistic synergy again I'm faced with a woman of such staggering beauty that I immediately want to abandon my experiment for a third time and watch the rest but RULES IS STILL BEING RULES, DAMMIT. The woman gets on a ferry, there's a staggering shot of the boat's ramp raising and then something happens which a) appears to tie all the films together and b) makes me wish I'd watched the films in their entirety before ruining the ending for myself.
In conclusion
I'm none the wiser about what the
Three Colours trilogy is about but I can tell you that it's unutterably beautiful to look at, remarkably gripping surprisingly quickly and very blue, white and red. I'll be watching the whole thing in full as soon as possible but for now, Organic Marketing, I think my work here is done. Any chance you could send me
Kill List?
I think this is the stupidest movie-watching experiment you have yet undertaken. The outcome of "spoiling the movie for yourself" could have been hypothesized from the outset. You are not worthy of your free blu-rays, Suit! I cast you out! Etc.
ReplyDeleteBiggest Blu-ray waste of money is Senna because most of the source material is TV recordings not even up to the best that standard definition can provide. The most annoying thing about Blu-ray players is that there is a vast amount of software that runs between popping in the disc and getting to see the movie that is all you want to happen. When you insert a disc it goes - shit! What the hell was that? I'm putting up a sign that says LOADING while I work out if I have a network connection in case there are some trailers I can force you to watch. If you try to avoid them I'll go into a big sulk and start at the beginning again. And if you have read this far that has taken you about as long as a Blu-ray player takes just to wake up from standby to on.
ReplyDelete@TheUnwashedMass Yeah but no but I'd read it was possible to watch them in any order so I thought I'd be fairly safe. Anyway think of it as me taking a bullet for those that haven't seen it. That way I look dead heroic.
ReplyDelete