Grieving, Therapy, Cinema and Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Rouge

Abstract

Cultural associations with red are potent. They include blood and intense passion, injury and death, love and life; and all these are authentic indications of Kieslowski’s themes. Yet in this film the connotations of the colour are not exclusively traditional because the heroine, a model, will have her image displayed on a gigantic scarlet billboard to promote bubble gum. The model’s glamorous, colour-saturated but transient world and the grey existence of an emotionally constipated senex come into contact. The initially hostile contact between this ill-matched pair brings them not into each other’s arms – this is no romantic comedy – but, through discovery of each other’s weaknesses and strengths, to a degree of completion (not perfection) in which conscious and unconscious are better aligned. In part they are moved by synchronicities in which the life of a young advocate begins to echo the judge’s past. Not only this factor (which extends the reach of the drama beyond the odd couple) but the ever present cultural socio-cultural background of advertising and judicial morality generalise the issues of the main protagonists across the European collective. Eventually the unforgettable calamity with which the film ends brings into focus the characteristics of the main protagonists from the entire trilogy that renders them psychologically convincing survivors.