14. The Three Colours Trilogy
MK2 DistributionAnother essential foreign language trilogy, this time heralding from Poland, is Krzysztof Kielowski's complex and probing interpretation of the ideals of the French flag - liberty, equality and fraternity - with the films Three Colours: Blue, White and Red. Juliette Binoche stars in Blue as a woman coming to terms with surviving the car crash which killed her husband and son; in White, Zbigniew Zamachowski stars as Karol Karol, a penniless Pole who travels back home in a trunk; Red concludes the trilogy with the radiant Irene Jacob as a model who strikes up a tentative friendship with an eavesdropping judge. Ambitious both in their ideas and the visual presentation of them, Kielowski effectively uses the concepts as a vehicle for nothing less than an examination of the human condition in all its varied, contradictory interplay of vices and virtues.