Diwali planning had taken over large part of the weeks following up to Diwali day. Hoping for a quiet break, we ended up more tired and exhausted after Diwali. We needed a weekend to cool off. A wholesome festive time of catching up with old friends, families and all things good, but packed schedules meant no time to relax.

Two weekends after Diwali was when we got into the mood of watching something. I whipped up my favourite “add any masala” chicken curry and called for roti to go with it. My father in law was in town and that meant the end of my K3G vibe. We surfed for films on Mubi – his favourite or rather, the only entertainment app he has subscribed to. We watched a film called Blind Chance which started weird but I was engrossed eventually and let’s say, I enjoyed it.

The Director of Blind Chance has made the Three Colours trilogy and my father in law and my husband had only praises for the Director. The film Three Colours : White caught my eye. Julie Delpy, who reminds me of the Before (Sunrise, Sunset, Midnight) trilogy was cast in this film. I watched Three Colours : White and as one would, I proceeded to the next from the trilogy – Three Colours : Red.

I have only recently started to follow and enjoy world cinema and honestly, it’s a bit daunting. So much is already said about these films. They remain masterpieces – of storytelling, direction and I don’t possibly know what else but I’m sure there’s much more. And yet, I am going out on the limb to say that if we just look at these films as stories – well executed, original works, they are enjoyable as they are anyway. I’m sure there are experts who can dissect and critique them but I’m going to start raw. Take each film as is and be honest about my thoughts on it.

Three Colours : Red is a film about fraternity, they say. To me, the film is about parallel lives lived by two characters who are destined to meet one day. The film starts with Valentine, a model, shooting for an advertisement. The photographer is instructing her to make a remorseful face for the photo. He keeps telling her, I want to see more remorse. It’s beautiful in that red background, Valentine is mechanically changing her facial expression to hit the brief of remorse. On the way back home after her day, she runs into a dog and forms a unique relationship with the dog owner, Joseph Kern.

Joseph is a retired judge who lives a lonely life. There’s a sense of sadness to the house he lives in, it’s almost falling apart, echoing exactly what he has become as a person. His free time is occupied in tapping neighbors’ phone calls and listening to them, something that he dosent shy away from revealing to Valentine. Valentine condemns Joseph’s act of violating someone’s privacy. And yet, we see that she is pulled towards him. Valentine is scared, curious and also hating on Joseph, all at once. The conversations between them stuck with me because as Valentine is struggling to get past her moral righteousness, Joseph, quite obviously immoral with his acts, is somehow convincing Valentine that it’s alright to break the morality barrier sometimes and see things as they are. To be curious about the world beyond the morality.

Across Valentine’s apartment, a young lawyer, Auguste resides who is studying to be appointed as a Judge. Auguste and Valentine don’t know each other and yet their lives keep intersecting. There so many interesting scenes depicting this intersection. Once when Valentine is at Joseph’s doorstep, you see Auguste in the background of the frame, dropping his girlfriend off in his red car. When Valentine is looking down at her car from her apartment window that is making emergency beeping noise and in the background we see Auguste’s girlfriend waving at him.

Auguste’s career and also his love life is weirdly similar to that of Joseph’s. Almost feels as though two different time periods are meeting at a common point. The exams for appointment of judge, their respective lovers cheating on them, it’s almost exact in the sense. I felt as though Auguste was Joseph’s second chance. What if after the traumatic break up of Auguste with his girlfriend, he meets Valentine and they end up together? Almost as if Joseph and Valentine were born in the same time period, would they have been more than just platonic friends?

The film does not quite conclude in a manner that each of the characters’ arc is resolved or straightened out, although the last scene of the film is painfully beautiful. It’s in keeping with the first scene when Valentine is enacting remorse on the screen which actually she then experiences for real at the end.

The running theme of the film is the colour red and we see that in the small and the obviously visible big things. Valentines contact book, the dog leash, legal books at Joseph’s house being some of the smaller red references.

The film runs for less than two hours but you don’t feel like it was a quick watch. I felt like every scene was created with a pause button. Until you don’t notice the small details, the scene doesn’t change, so some of the frames of the film really stay with you. It’s a beautiful watch, this one. You’d want to indulge into this one on a cold winter night, cozying up on a couch with a cup of coffee.

-Aishwarya Bedekar