Rating: 
Summary: Layers of life unfold before you...
Review: Red unfolds slowly in your mind. It would be wise to view this film several times. The layering is rich and complex. The color scheme hints at the emotional states of the characters in each intricately planned scene. Personally, I feel this is the best of the Three Colors Trilogy, but they all have their charms. Red just has a resonance that permeates your soul and gives your mind something to ponder and slowly unwrap. Think of it like a puzzle, and let the film seep into your subconscious. It could haunt you for weeks after the initial viewing. Don't forget to pay special attention to the series of phone calls at the beginning of the movie, they hint strongly at what is to come.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best movies I've ever seen in my life
Review: The movie forces you to think, analyze and look at the world from so many different angles. Is there indeed a parallel world out there.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: The symbolism in this movie goes on and on. In many ways the Judge is like God, who knows everyone's inner secrets and is judges them. Later he is stoned (his house is)by his neighbors. He directs the Valentine to take the ferry. He oversees the shipwreck which bring her and August together. At the fashion show, he is overhead Valentine and although she looks for him, he cannot be seen. This movies makes complex statements about the love of God. Red is symbolic of fraternity in the French flag, which also can been see as love between beings. The more you think about this movie and the more you see it, the more significant everything becomes.
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Summary: symbolism and god
Review: The symbolism in this movie works in a number of sweeping loops impling much, without telling the viewer anything explicitly(perhaps that's even the definition of symbolism). To pick one example, the broken glass at the bowling alley is symbolic of august's broken relationship with the blond woman. Their relationship is not yet over, and the glass may not have been broken by August, or even be his glass. It is there to draw a parrellel between the broken glass in the bowling alley and the broken glass jar in the judge's house (which was presumably broken by a rock projectile). Both times they are symbolic for a broken man.
I don't buy the god parrellel's with the judge. The judge listens in on people's conversations. He knows many facts about August, certainly he knows he is training to be a judge. He may even know the story of the book that fell open on the street to the question on the exam.
I don't believe one is suppose to literally believe that the judge has power over, or any specific knowledge of, the events that are coming in the future. He is well informed about both val et august's past and REALLY doesn't want them to fall into the same pattern of despair that he did. He has a dream about Val, which we are to presume will come true. This knowledge did not eminate from him, but was given to him. Based on the existance of the decalogue, it's a fair guess that Kieslowski believes in an omnipotent god.
All the characters in all three movies are saved at the end. They are all given a reprive to go out and change. In a sence, all three movies are telling the story of how seven people who had a huge range of flaws and problems, got a second chance. The randomness of the events and their continued parrellels with previous events tell us of the perfect, unknownable (except through an omnicent perspective in a film, or by a god) majesty of life.
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Summary: One of the best movies of all time
Review: This a great, complex, and emotional story of a relationship between an old judge and a young model. The movie's cinematography and direction (both Oscar nominated) are just spactacular. Loved it!
Rating:
Summary: Almost surrealistic
Review: This film deals mostly with unexpected friendship and exchange of information between the youthful, idealistic, and beautiful model Valentine and the rather grizzled old misanthropic judge for whom life has no meaning and who spends his days wiretapping his neighbors.One of his neighbors is having an affair and the judge has recorded some pretty intimate conversations on tape. Valentine spends her days modeling and attending ballet classes; huge advertising posters bathed in red of her appear around Geneva; one night she hits a dog with her car which provides the reason for this relationship to develop. Each has something to offer the other: Valentine offers the cynical judge hope through her youth and the art of conversation and gentle persuasion; after his conversations with her, the tired old man gives up wiretapping and turns himself into authorities, and emerges with a new,more positive attitude (the fact that his dog has a litter of 7 puppies also helps); the judge has his personal history to relate to Valentine which she feels may be important to her future. "I feel something important is going on here," she says. He relates a dream he had recently in which Valentine was 50 and "woke up beside someone." Valentine takes his dream seriously. His history includes a long ago love with a woman who rejected him when he was a young lawyer ("all her furniture was white,she was blonde") and whose lover he convicted of a crime many years later, after this, his only love, died in a car accident.
Perhaps by accident, Valentine lives across the street in Geneva from a young lawyer whose life very closely resembles the old judge in his youth in numerous ways. The film details the young lawyer Auguste's daily life as a law student in Geneva, in which he is also spurned by a woman. Valentine has a boyfriend in London whom she talks with on the phone,a long-distance romance, and also a mother and younger brother who live in Calais. Unbeknownst to her mother, her younger brother is a drug addict. Valentine discusses her brother, who never knew his own father, with the judge. Valentine plans to visit her boyfriend in London but on the Channel ferry trip, which she looked forward to very much and about which she shares her enthusiasm with the old judge, the ferry boat sinks in bad weather and she and the young lawyer from Geneva are the only Swiss survivors. It is left to speculate whether Valentine and Auguste can develop a relationship.
"Red" has a positive tone, but the 1st installment in this trilogy,"Blue" is somewhat less optimistic. It concerns the 33-year-old woman who loses her famous composer husband and child in a car accident. The woman wants to forget her former life and rents an apartment in Paris to distance herself from all attachments, except for her mother who lives in a nursing home. She throws away her husband's musical scores, even knowing they are an important contribution to musical history. Some reviewers have commented that this attempt at detachment could be similar to Eastern religions. In this film, unlike "Red", animals have a negative connotation. She befriends a prostitute who lives downstairs and comes to appreciate some similarities between a street musician's flute music and her husband's. Eventually she is willing to help one of her husband's former associates ( who has loved her for some time) complete an unfinished score. But she finds out that her husband was having an affair of several years duration with a young attractive lawyer, who is now pregnant with his child.. Forgiving her, she makes arrangements to will her part of her husband's estate.
The film is bathed in blue, much more so than "Red" is bathed in red. She swims several times in a local pool--all blue--she owns a blue mobile sculpture, for starters. There are numerous closeups of her face in this film and it is truly a one-actress film.
Rating:
Summary: so many levels/so much beauty
Review: This is a film in several layers...it will take more than one viewing to absorb. It explores reality, how we are all connected to each other, and the notion of anything being "just a coincidence". There is meaning in every nuance of this film and we become aware of the significance of every minute that passes in our own lives as well. Kieslowski is the master of revealing mysteries, but he makes us lift the veils, one by one. The cast is superb, and the use of the color red wonderful !
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Summary: Red is the color of love
Review: This is a sometimes clever, sometimes corny, but always beautiful story of predestined love. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a retired judge, corrupted by an all-consuming cynicism, who meets a beautiful girl, but doesn't fall in love with her. Instead, his reincarnation does, and he mystically orchestrates their predestined meeting. The girl is played by Irène Jacob, who is earnest, warm, uncorrupted and beautiful. She's a French model unloved by her boyfriend (fool that he is) with a demeanor proud, but not vain, vulnerable, but not weak. The judge is so pathetic that he spies on his neighbors' phone conversations to spice up his lonely and pitiful existence. Their love affairs, their spats, their crimes are piped into him as he sits alone in his house. But she has the genius to appreciate him and to understand him, and so frees him from his bitterness. We see in this, the final third of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy, something reminiscent of his countryman, Roman Polanski, in his passion for young actresses and his ability to bring out the best in them. We see further in the character of the retired judge a projection of ideas about how an old man, past any pretense, might love a young woman: wisely, delicately, from a slight distance, without a hint of lechery. Irène Jacob makes us believe that innocence and instinctive goodness are wondrous qualities, regrettably not much touted these days. More often depicted are women who would rather sing proudly of being bitches while acting out violent, two-fisted, emulations of a bogus masculinity, e.g., see "Single White Female," etc. Red is for her lips, for the color of curtains and theater seats, for the color of her true love's utility vehicle (often in her sight, but not yet recognized), for doors and panels and for the warm beat of her heart. Her name is Valentine. She is the dream of the worldly man who has known many women, whose head is not easily turned. And red is for the ringing of the phone, heard in its urgency as red. I liked this better than Blue or White, both of which were very good; but the clash of innocence and cynicism here, with youth and age so aptly contrasted, along with a clever plot (Kieslowski loves to surprise us), highlighted by captivating performances from the leads, make this the best of the three.
Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable
Review: This is Kieslowski's finest work. It is an stunningly beautiful and thoughtful film from beginning to end.
Rating:
Summary: A great finale!
Review: This last part of the grand Kieslowski's trilogy sets the viewer in the heart of the persons who have the character to make this world go round. Kieslowski gives us various signs to interpret throughout "Blue" and "White" but it is in "Red" that they all resolve and still provides us with new dilemmas to take with us into our human lives. Kieslowski is truly one of our contemporary directors who really knew how to capture the human behaviour caused by the emotions and coincidences of everyday life.
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