Few things are more mysterious than someone else’s favorite film. To hear it named is to be puzzled. You appreciate its merits but not how it can be preferable to all others. Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible way. Often, you first see it when you’re young, but not too young, and on each subsequent viewing it is a home to which you return.
I first saw Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Red” in 1996, in the basement of a college library in Michigan. Valentine, a young woman in Geneva, played with austere grace by Irène Jacob, accidentally runs over a dog, loads the bloodied animal into her car, and seeks out its owner, a surly retired judge named Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who seems not to care about the dog, and who, Valentine discovers, passes his days listening in on his neighbors’ telephone conversations. They are drawn into a relationship—not a romance but a series of tenderly exchanged confidences. In one scene, the judge, on his birthday, wonders if he made the right decisions during his career. There is another thread: Valentine’s neighbor, a law student named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), whom she doesn’t know but often passes in the street, is betrayed by his girlfriend. The three characters move through perfectly average days—unlocking an apartment door in time to catch a ringing phone, stopping at a kiosk to buy a newspaper—but their gestures seem to be part of a larger pattern.
The hushed intensity of the film, the sense of inner workings not fully grasped, stayed with me. I have since seen “Red” more than a dozen times: with my siblings during Thanksgiving in Alabama; alone in a crowd on the Museumsinsel, in Berlin; in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Geneva; on a stalled Amtrak train somewhere near Poughkeepsie. Kieślowski uses the tiniest gestures to illuminate dilemmas: the camera lingering on Valentine’s face as she tries to figure out where the dog, which she has adopted, has run off to; the twitch of Auguste’s jaw when he realizes that his girlfriend has another lover.
Kieślowski explores the experiences of two people who live in the same city, visit the same places, touch the same doorknobs. Does their proximity have any meaning? Will they meet? He also looks at episodes from Joseph’s life that are curiously reiterated in Auguste’s: both drop a book, and it opens to a crucial page; both abandon their dogs. Kieślowski suggests that two separate lives can be enigmatically linked, displaced only in time. The search for one’s double is like a bird’s when looking for a branch. Color forms another set of links in the film: red street lights, billboards, furniture, clothing seem interconnected in the same gentle and elusive way that the characters are. They create an alternative map of the city.
Kieślowski, who grew up under Communist rule, in Poland, was unembarrassed by big questions. What is the role of religion in modern life? Why does love so often force people into comical situations? “Red” was his last film, the final installment of a trilogy on which he worked with premonitory fervor before he died, at the age of fifty-four. “Blue,” a film about the confusions particular to grief, was followed by the picaresque romance “White.” Finally came “Red,” glowing and humane. At the end, two principal characters from each of the three films are brought together by chance on a sinking ferry, as though this were the fate they were being drawn toward all along.
I learned from Kieślowski how unforeseen encounters can subtly pile up and determine the course of a person’s life. In any narrative, there is the material that moves the story forward. But the storyteller also includes objects or events that hint at a pattern of signification swirling above the surface, part of the story’s logic but just out of reach.
In my novel “Open City,” as the narrator waits for an older friend at a restaurant he watches the news on a TV with the volume muted. There’s bad weather in the English Channel, and a ferry has capsized. Heavy rain is forecast for all of Europe. The bad weather, the sinking ferry, and the oneiric mood of this passage are an homage to “Red.” It wasn’t until after the novel was published that I discovered I shared a birthday with Kieślowski. The bird had found its branch. ♦
