Three Colours Red

 Saw Three Colours Red at QFT the other day. It's a film that I haven't seen for thirty years and I remember adoring it. I think, in retrospect, what I was adoring was it's star Irene Jacob, a saucer-eyed gamine, playing a model with a coercive boyfriend you never see. I was barely into my twenties when I first watched this and it made perfect sense. Watching it again, in my jaded 50's, it's clearly beautiful nonsense, almost a satire of a French Film (one made by a Pole and set in Switzerland). Jacob's Valentine is impossibly beautiful, kind, decent and largely humourless. She's a sedate pixie dream girl, drifting around like tumbleweed, pouting when her boyfriend is rude to her on the phone, and gently re-buffing the advances of a sleazy photographer. When she knocks down an old man's dog with her car, she takes the dog - Rita - to his house where he, remote and unconcerned, tells her to take the dog to the vet - and she does. And pays for it, even though she's a student. 

Now this seemed perfectly normal to me in the early 90's when I'd had precisely one girlfriend and assumed the world was positively with crammed doe-eyed beauties dressed in charcoal and black, who couldn't do enough for you. Why not? I believed films, and sophisticated French cinema was choked with troubled women with attractive frowns, smoking and staring out of cafe windows. This might as well have been an Italian neo-realist movie or a kitchen sink drama: this was what life was like. I would smoke and drink black coffee and wear a scarf and meet a troubled, mildly distracted but heart-stoppingly beautiful girl, and the movie would stop on the point of our happiness because, after all, what else was there to say? We'd probably listen to Erik Satie together in a cluttered flat full of books and dust. 

Actually, some of that happened. In part, most of that happened. But there was a lot more creative cowardice and working terrible jobs in bad clothes in boring offices than I'd anticipated. But I drank a lot of red wine and did listen to Erik Satie while staring out of a lot of windows, ruminating on failed romances. 

When I look at this film now I see a beautifully made confection, a melange of "filmic" ideas twizzled together. The dialogue is perfunctory and po-faced, the character's relationships contrived. There are two characters attempting to predict the future. One succeeds, the other dies of her hubris. The story plays out like a long-form video for Abba's "The Day Before You Came", though it adds a verse about nearly drowning in an unspecified ferry disaster. The mirroring of the old judge and the new - the older one's story as he tells it is the exact action of the younger's as we see it on screen - I liked. He's like the Greek Fate Clotho, the telephone wires the threads he weaves. He seems to know too much, even without his eavesdropping. His knowing look to camera in the final minutes of the film confirms he has been the architect of all the action, and will now live a second life through his younger doppelganger, having killed off the surrogate of the woman who broke his heart. Did he conjure it? He is an Old Judge, a decider of fates. Is he inflexible Atropos as well, cutting the strings of this faithless marionette? 

By the way, the best scene in the film is the heartbroken younger judge staring through a bar window to see his girlfriend drinking with another man. He is showing her glossy 8 x 10s of his yacht. Perfectly ordinary behaviour. 

I do like this film. I don't mind films having faults. It looks fabulous, I loved all the red flashing through it, plus the brilliant tease of Jacob recreating the pose of her advertisement in the final seconds of the film. It had been hinted at every time her hair got wet in the film and there it was, finally, brilliantly satisfying. In being saved from drowning Valentine makes sense of the slogan for her chewing gum campaign: "Breathe for Life". 

I'd seen Irene Jacob before in the woozily sexy "The Double of Veronique" and would see her again in "All Men are Mortal" and "Othello". I saw her in real life in a production of Madame Melville as the unlikely love interest of Macaulay Culkin. That was 23 years ago. Bloody hell.   

I've not followed her career of late, however. The fickleness of young love. The faltering heart. Valentine and Auguste may yet be in need of a happy ending, despite the dog's entrails predictions of the Judge. 

 I would point out Three Colours Red is currently the only film to have a perfect score rating on Rotten Tomatoes so, like, what do I know?