Three Colors: Red (1994)

AKA Trois couleurs: Rouge

Directed by
Krzysztof Kieslowski

Written by
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Krzysztof Piesiewicz

The film begins with clips that track a telephone call between London and Geneva, where a university student and part-time model, Valentine Dusot (Irene Jacob), is talking to her emotionally infantile and possessive boyfriend. During her work as a model she poses for a chewing-gum campaign and during the photo shoot the photographer asks her to look very sad. While walking back home Auguste, a neighbour of Valentine's, drops a set of books and he notices that a particular chapter of the Criminal Code was open at random and he concentrates on that passage. While driving back to her apartment Valentine is distracted by adjusting the radio which is emitting a strange signal and she accidentally runs over a dog. She tracks down the owner, a reclusive retired judge, Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He seems unconcerned by the accident or the injuries sustained by Rita, his dog. Valentine takes Rita to a veterinarian, where she learns that Rita is pregnant. Valentine takes the dog home.

Whilst walking Rita the next day the dog runs away and Valentine eventually finds the dog back at Kern's house. He gives the dog to Valentine. A short time later Valentine finds Kern eavesdropping on his neighbours' private telephone conversations (possibly the cause of the disruptive signal on Valentine's radio). Valentine threatens to denounce Kern to his neighbours and initially goes to do so but then changes her mind. Kern tells Valentine that it shall make no difference that she denounces him for his spying, the people's lives he listens to shall eventually turn into hell. She leaves saying that she feels nothing but pity for him.

Whilst visiting Kern, Valentine hears a telephone conversation between her neighbour, Auguste, and his girlfriend, Karin (Frederique Feder). They discuss if they should go bowling. Valentine covers her ears but from the very little she hears she concludes that they love each other. Kern disagrees. That evening Valentine is alone at home and hopes that her boyfriend will call but it is the photographer who calls, saying that her poster was set up that evening and asks her bowling to celebrate. Later Auguste takes his exam and passes it and becomes a judge. Karin asks him if he was asked any questions regarding the article that was open when he dropped his books. Auguste says yes. Karin gives him a fountain pen as a gift and he wonders what the first judgment he signs with it will be. That evening, Kern writes a series of letters to his neighbours and denounces himself, and the community files a class action. At the law courts, he sees Karin meeting another man. Earlier Auguste had missed a call from Karin and tried to call her back but never hears from her again.

Valentine reads the news about a retired judge that spied on his neighbours and she goes to Kern telling him that she said nothing to anybody. He confesses that it was him just to see what she would do. He asks her in and shows her that Rita has had seven puppies. They discuss that on their last conversation she spoke about pity but he later realized that it was actually disgust. He wonders about the reasons why people obey laws and it turns out that often it is more on selfish grounds and from fear than about obeying the law or being decent. It is his birthday and they have a couple of drinks. During their conversation he reminisces about a sailor he acquitted a long time ago, only later realizing he had made a mistake, and that the man was guilty. However the man later married and had children and later grandchildren and lives peacefully and happy. Valentine says that he did what he had to do, but Kern wonders how many other people that he acquitted or condemned might have seen a different life had he decided otherwise. Valentine tells Kern about her intended trip to England to visit her boyfriend. Kern suggests that she take the ferry.

Auguste has been unable to reach Karin since graduation so he goes to her place and sees her having sex with another man. Distraught, he leaves. On another occasion, Auguste sees Karin and her new boyfriend in a restaurant, he gets her attention but when she rushes outside to try to explain he hides from her. In a temper, he ties his dog by a quayside and abandons it.

Karin is employed to provide a personalised weather service by telephone. Kern calls this and enquires about the weather in the English Channel for when Valentine travels to England. Karin states that she expects the weather to be perfect and reveals that she is about to take a trip there (with her new boyfriend who owns a boat).

The day before Valentine leaves, she invites Kern to a fashion show where she is modeling. After the show they speak about the dream Kern had about her, where he saw her at the age of 40-50 years old and happy with an unidentified man. The conversation then turns to Kern and the reasons why he disliked Karin. Kern reveals that before becoming a judge, he was in love with a woman very much like Karin, who betrayed him for another man. While preparing for his exam, he once went to the same theatre where the fashion show took place and he accidentally dropped one of his books. When he picked it up, Kern studied the chapter where the book accidentally opened, which turned out to be the crucial question at his examination. When he broke up with his girlfriend he followed her across the English Channel but never saw her again, because she died in an accident. Later, he was assigned to judge a case where the defendant was the same man who took his girlfriend from him. Regardless of this connection, Kern did not recuse himself from the case, since the connection was only known to him, and condemned the man, the judgment was legal but he subsequently resigned his post.

Valentine takes her ferry to England, and Auguste is also on the ferry, clutching the dog he had abandoned, although the two never quite meet each other. Suddenly a storm rises and sinks both the ferry and the boat with Karin and her boyfriend. Only seven survivors are pulled from the ferry: the main characters from the first two films of the trilogy, Julie and Olivier from Blue, Karol and Dominique from White, and Valentine and Auguste, who meet for the first time, as well as an English bartender named Stephen Killian. As with the other films, the film's final sequence shows a character crying - in this case, the judge - but the final image replicates the iconic chewing-gum poster of Valentine.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111495/

Three Colors: White (1994)

AKA Trzy kolory: Bialy

Directed by
Krzysztof Kieslowski

Written by
Krzysztof Kieslowski (scenario)
Krzysztof Piesiewicz (scenario)
Agnieszka Holland (scenario collaborator)
Edward Zebrowski (scenario collaborator)
Edward Klosinski (scenario collaborator)
Marcin Latallo (dialogue translation)

After opening with a brief, seemingly irrelevant scene of a suitcase on an airport carousel, the story quickly focuses on a Paris divorce court where Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is pleading with the judge — the same legal proceedings that Juliette Binoche's character briefly stumbled upon in Blue. The immigrant Karol, despite his difficulty in understanding French, is made to understand that his wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) does not love him. The grounds for divorce are humiliating: Karol was unable to consummate the marriage. Along with his wife, he loses his means of support (a beauty salon they jointly owned), his legal residency in France, and the rest of his cash in a series of mishaps, and is soon a beggar. He only retains a 2 franc coin.

In a Paris Métro station, performing songs for spare change, Karol meets and is befriended by another Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos). While Karol has lost his wife and his property, Mikołaj is married and successful, he offers Karol a job consisting of killing someone who wants to be dead but does not have enough courage to do it himself. Through a hazardous scheme, Mikołaj helps him return to Poland hidden in the suitcase shown at the beginning of the film, which is later stolen by employees at the airport. He returns to working as a hairdresser with his brother (Jerzy Stuhr).

Karol takes a job as a bodyguard in a seemingly innocent cash exchange office. Mikołaj meets Karol in a Warsaw Metro tunnel for the execution of the "suicide", it turns out to be that Mikołaj is the intended victim and asks Karol to kill him. Karol shoots a blank into Mikołaj's chest and asks him if he really wants to go through with it as the next bullet is real. Mikołaj refuses and is able to feel alive again. Using his position as a deceptively foolish bodyguard, Karol spies on his bosses and discovers their scheme to purchase different pieces of land that they knew were going to be targeted by big companies for development and resell for large profits. Karol beats them to it, and then tells his ex-bosses that if they kill him all his estate shall go to the Church, and they are therefore forced to purchase all the land from him.

With the money he gained from this scheme and with the payment from Mikołaj, the two go into business (of a vaguely defined but possibly illegal nature) together. Karol becomes ruthlessly ambitious, focusing his energies on money-making schemes while learning French and brooding over his wife's abandonment. He uses his new financial influence in a world where, as several characters observe, "you can buy anything" to execute a complex scheme to first win back Dominique, and then destroy her life by faking his own death after which she is imprisoned for his 'murder'. The final image of the film shows Karol staring at Dominique through the window of her prison cell, while crying.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111507/

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

AKA Trois couleurs: Bleu

Directed by
Krzysztof Kieslowski

Written by
Krzysztof Kieslowski (scenario)
Krzysztof Piesiewicz (scenario)
Agnieszka Holland (scenario collaborator)
Edward Zebrowski (scenario collaborator)
Slawomir Idziak (scenario collaborator)

Julie (Juliette Binoche), wife of the famous composer Patrice de Courcy, must cope with the death of her husband and daughter in an automobile accident she herself survives. While recovering in the hospital, Julie attempts suicide by overdose, but cannot swallow the pills. After being released from the hospital, Julie closes up the house she lived in with her family and takes an apartment in Paris without telling anyone. She leaves behind all her clothes and possessions, taking only a chandelier of blue beads that presumably belonged to her daughter.

For the remainder of the film, Julie disassociates herself from all past memories and distances herself from former friendships, as can be derived from a conversation she has with her mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and believes Julie is her own sister Marie-France. She also destroys the score for her late husband's last commissioned, though unfinished, work—a piece celebrating European unity, following the end of the Cold War. It is strongly suggested that she wrote, or at least co-wrote, her husband's last work. Snatches of the music haunt her throughout the film.

She reluctantly befriends an exotic dancer who is having an affair with one of the neighbours and helps her when she needs moral support. Despite her desire to live anonymously and alone, life in Paris forces Julie to confront elements of her past that she would rather not face, including Olivier (Benoît Régent), a friend of the couple. Olivier is also a composer and former assistant of Patrice's at the conservatory. He is in love with Julie, and suspects that she is in fact the true author of her late husband's music. Olivier appears in a TV interview announcing that he shall try to complete Patrice's commission. Julie also discovers that her late husband was having an affair.

While both trying to stop Olivier from completing the score, and finding out who her husband's mistress was, she becomes more engaged in her former life. She tracks down Sandrine (Florence Pernel), Patrice's mistress, and finds out that she is carrying his child; Julie arranges for her to have her husband's house and recognition of his paternity for the child. This provokes her to begin a relationship with Olivier, and to resurrect her late husband's last composition, which has been changing according to her notes on Olivier's work. Olivier decides not to incorporate the changes suggested by Julie, stating that this piece is now his music and has ceased to be Patrice's. He says that she must either accept his composition with all its roughness or she must allow people to know the truth about her composition. She agrees on the grounds that the truth about her husband's music would not be revealed as her own work.

In the final sequence, the Unity of Europe piece is played (which features chorus and a solo soprano singing Saint Paul's 1 Corinthians 13 epistole in Greek), and images are seen of all the people Julie has affected by her actions. The final image is of Julie, crying—the second time she does so in the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108394/

In the Mood for Love (2000)

AKA 花樣年華; 花样年华; Huāyàng niánhuá; Fa yeung nin wa (Fā yeuhng nìhn wàh)

Directed by
Wong Kar-wai

Writing credits
Wong Kar-wai

The film takes place in Hong Kong, 1962. Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), a journalist, rents a room in an apartment of a building on the same day as Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary from a shipping company. They become next-door neighbors. Each has a spouse who works and often leaves them alone on overtime shifts. Despite the presence of a friendly Shanghainese landlady, Mrs. Suen, and bustling, mahjong-playing neighbors, Chow and Su often find themselves alone in their rooms. Their lives continue to intersect in everyday situations: a recurring motif in this film is the loneliness of eating alone, and the film documents the leads' chance encounters, each making their individual trek to the street noodle stall.

Chow and Su each nurse suspicions about their own spouse's fidelity; each comes to the conclusion that their spouses have been seeing each other. Su wonders aloud how their spouse's affair might have began, and together, Su and Chow re-enact what they imagine might have happened.

Chow soon invites Su to help him write a martial arts serial for the papers. As their relationship develops, their neighbors begin to take notice. In the context of a socially conservative 1960s' Hong Kong, friendships between men and women bear scrutiny. Chow rents a hotel room away from the apartment where he and Su can work together without attracting attention. The relationship between Chow and Su is platonic, and defiantly so, as there is the suggestion that they would be degraded if they stooped to the level of their spouses. As time passes, however, they acknowledge that they have developed feelings for each other. Chow leaves Hong Kong for a job in Singapore. He asks Su to go with him; Chow waits for her at the hotel room for a time, and then leaves. She can be seen rushing down the stairs of her apartment, only to arrive at the empty hotel room, too late to join Chow.

The next year, Su goes to Singapore and visits Chow's apartment where she calls Chow, who is working for a Singaporean newspaper, but she remains silent on the phone when Chow picks up. Later, Chow realizes she has visited his apartment after seeing a lipstick-stained cigarette butt in his ashtray. While dining with a friend, Chow relays a story about how in older times, when a person had a secret that could not be shared, he would instead go atop a mountain, make a hollow in a tree, whisper the secret into that hollow and cover it with mud.

Three years later, Su visits with her former landlady, Mrs. Suen. Mrs. Suen is about to emigrate to the United States, and Su inquires about whether the apartment is available for rent. Some time later, Chow returns to visit his landlords, the Koos. He finds they have emigrated to the Philippines. He asks about the Suen family next door, and the new owner tells him a woman and her son are now living next door. He leaves without realizing Su is the lady living next door.

The film ends at Siem Reap, Cambodia, where Chow is seen visiting the Angkor Wat. At the site of a ruined monastery, he whispers for some time into a hollow in a ruined wall, before plugging the hollow with mud.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/

An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

AKA Sanma no aji

Director:
Yasujirô Ozu

Writers:
Kôgo Noda
Yasujirô Ozu

 

Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) is an aging widower with a married eldest son, Koichi (Keiji Sada), and two unmarried children – a 24-year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and a younger son Kazuo (Shinichirô Mikami). Since marriage Koichi has shifted out with his wife, leaving Kazuo and Hirayama in Michiko's care.

Hirayama and his fellow classmates Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) and Horie (Ryuji Kita) go to a class reunion where one of their teachers, Sakuma (Eijiro Tono), nicknamed the "Gourd", is in attendance. The friends tease Horie who has married a much younger wife. They reminisce about the past and Sakuma has too much to drink, and Kawai and Hirayama have to bring him home. They meet his spinster daughter Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura), who has missed the chance to marry when young, and is now too old to marry.

Koichi borrows 50,000 yen from his father to buy a refrigerator, but plans to use the excess money to buy second-hand golf clubs. His wife Akiko (Mariko Okada) is in disagreement, but finally relents. However, she decides ill-temperedly to use some of this extra money to buy for herself a white leather purse as well.

Sakuma tells his former pupils that it is owing to his own selfishness that his daughter is now an old spinster. Troubled by Sakuma's daughter's example, Hirayama decides on an arranged marriage for Michiko. He asks Koichi if Koichi's colleague Miura (Teruo Yoshida), whom Michiko is fond of, is interested in Michiko. Unfortunately, Miura is already engaged. Koichi and Hirayama break the news to a visibly upset Michiko, and later ask her if she is willing to go for a matchmaking session with a candidate Kawai has selected. Michiko agrees.

In one of the ellipses Ozu is famous for, the film forwards to Michiko's wedding day. (Michiko clearly has agreed to marry, though her bridegroom is never shown.) Michiko prepares to wed in a traditional wedding kimono. (The actual ceremony is never shown.) Hirayama goes to a bar to celebrate her wedding afterwards and ends up drunk. When he returns, Koichi and his wife go off, leaving behind Kazuo who duly goes to bed, and a melancholic Hirayama sitting in the middle of the night.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056444/

Andrei Rublev (1966)

AKA Андрей Рублёв

Director:
Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers:
Andrei Konchalovskiy
Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Rublev is divided into seven chapters and a prologue and an epilogue only loosely related to the main film. The main film charts the life of the great icon painter through several episodes of his life. The background is 15th century Russia, a turbulent period characterized by fighting between rival princes and the Tatar invasions.

The film's prologue shows the preparations for a hot air balloon ride. The balloon takes off from the roof of a church, with a man named Yefim (Nikolay Glazkov) roped beneath the balloon, at the very moment of arrival of an ignorant mob trying to thwart the flight. The man is highly delighted by the sight from the air, but can not prevent a crash landing. Yefim is the first of several creative characters, representing the daring escapist, whose hopes are easily crushed. After the crash, a horse is seen lolling by a pond, a symbol of life — one of many horses in the movie.

The Jester, Summer 1400: Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn), Danil (Nikolai Grinko) and Kirill (Ivan Lapikov) are wandering monks, looking for work. The three represent different creative characters. Andrei is the observer, a humanistic artist who searches for the good in people and wants to inspire and not frighten. Danil is withdrawn and resigned, and not as bent on creativity as on self-realization. Kirill lacks talent, yet strives to achieve prominence. He is jealous, self-righteous, very intelligent and perceptive. The three have just left the Andronikov Monastery, where they have lived many years, heading to Moscow. During a heavy rain they seek shelter in a barn, where a group of villagers is being entertained by a jester (Rolan Bykov). The jester, or skomorokh, is a bitterly sarcastic enemy of the state and the Church, who is earning a living with his scathing and obscene social commentary and by making fun of the Boyars. He ridicules the monks as they come in, and after some time Kirill leaves unnoticed. Shortly, the skomorokh is picked up by a group of soldiers, knocked out headfirst against a tree and taken away.

Theophanes the Greek, Summer-Winter-Spring-Summer 1405–1406: Kirill arrives at the Theophanes the Greek's workshop, where Theophanes the Greek (Nikolai Sergeyev), a prominent and well-recognized master, is working on another of his icons. Theophanes the Greek is portrayed as a complex character: an established artist, humanistic and God-fearing in his views yet somewhat cynical, regarding his art more as a craft and a chore in his disillusion with other people. His young apprentices have all run away to the town square, where a convicted criminal is about to be tortured and executed in public. Kirill talks to Theophanes, and the artist, impressed by his erudition, invites him to work as an apprentice on the decoration of Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow. Kirill refuses at first, but then accepts the offer on the only condition that Theophanes will personally come to the Andronikov Monastery and invite Kirill to work with him in view of all the fraternity and Andrei Rublev.

The three monks are back at the Andronikov Monastery. Theophanes the Greek sends a messenger to Andrei to ask him for his assistance in decorating Cathedral of the Annunciation. Both Danil and Kirill are agitated by the recognition Andrei experiences. Danil refuses to accompany Andrei and reproaches him for accepting Theophanes's offer lightly and without considering his fellows, but soon repents of his temper and wishes Andrei well. Kirill is jealous and in great anger, and he leaves the monastery for the secular world, throwing the accusations of greed in the face of the monks. Andrei leaves for Moscow with his young apprentice Foma (Mikhail Kononov). Foma is another creative character, representing the light-hearted and practical-minded commercial artist. Still he seems to be contemplative enough to get along with Andrei.

"The Andrei Passion": While walking in the woods, Andrei and Foma have a conversation about Foma's faults, especially lying. While Foma has talent as an artist, he is less concerned with the deeper meaning of his work and more concerned with practical aspects of the job, like perfecting his azure. They encounter Theophanes in the forest, and the old master sends Foma away. As he leaves, the apprentice finds a dead bird and pokes it. We cut to a conversation between Andrei and Theophanes, this time set on a stream bank. Theophanes argues that the ignorance of the Russian people is due to stupidity, while Andrei says that he doesn't understand how he can be a painter and maintain such views. "I'd have taken vows of schema long ago and settled down in a cave for good." This section contains a reenactment of Christ's Atonement, which plays as Andrei recounts the story and expresses his faith.

The Holiday, 1408: During a nightly walk Andrei encounters a group of naked pagans, whose celebration implies sensuality and lust. Andrei feels attracted by the rituals he witnesses. He is caught by the pagans and tied to a cross, and threatened to be drowned in the morning. A woman named Marfa (Nelly Snegina), only dressed with a mantle approaches Andrei. She drops her mantle, kisses and then frees him. The next morning as Andrei leaves a group of soldiers arrives and rounds up the pagans. Marfa tries to escape by running into the river and swimming near Andrei’s boat. He and his fellow monks look away in shame.

The Last Judgment, Summer 1408: Andrei and Danil are working on the decoration of a church in Vladimir. Over months, work is not progressing, as Andrei is doubting himself. He confides to Danil that his painting disgusts him and that he is unable to paint a subject such as the Last Judgement, as he doesn’t want to terrify people. He comes to the conclusion that he has lost the ease of mind that an artist needs for his work. He has a flashback during which he remembers his time working for the Grand Prince, who put out the eyes of artisans to prevent them from reproducing their beautiful work for someone else. As the flashback ends, Durochka (Irma Raush), a holy fool or Yurodivy, wanders into the church. Her feeble-mindedness and innocence leads Andrei to the idea to paint a feast.

The Raid, Autumn 1408: While the Grand Prince is away in Lithuania, the Grand Prince’s brother and a group of Tatars raid Vladimir. The invasion and the resulting carnage is shown in great detail. One famous scene shows a horse falling from a flight of stairs and being stabbed by a spear. Another famous scene shows a cow set on fire. The tatars enter the church. Andrei prevents the rape of Durochka by a Russian by slaying the perpetrator. Shaken by this event Andrei falls into self-doubt and decides to give up painting and takes a vow of silence.

The Silence, Winter 1412: Andrei is once again at the Andronikov Monastery. He neither paints nor speaks and keeps Durochka with him. After several years of absence, Kirill shows up at the monastery and asks to be taken in. The father superior allows him to return, but requires him to copy the scriptures fifteen times. One day, Tatars stop at the monastery while traveling through. One of the Tatars takes Durochka away as his eighth wife.

The Bell, Spring-Summer-Winter-Spring 1423–1424: Andrei's life turns around when he witnesses the casting of a bell. As the bellmaker has died, his son Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) lies to the men that he knows the secret of casting a bell. Boriska is another creative character. He is aware of his own importance and the difficult task at hand. He is able to create through a combination of natural skill and pure faith. Boriska supervises the digging of the pit, the selection of the clay, the building of the mold, the firing of the furnaces and the hoisting of the bell. Boriska collapses in tears when the bell rings perfectly at the inauguration ceremony. Witnessing the ceremony Andrei breaks his vow of silence and tells the boy that they should go together. "You’ll cast bells. I’ll paint icons."

The epilogue is the only part of the film in color and shows details of several of Andrei Rublev's icons. The icons are shown in the following order: Enthroned Christ, Twelve Apostles, The Annunciation, Twelve Apostles, Jesus entering Jerusalem, Birth of Christ, Enthroned Christ, Transfiguration of Jesus, Resurrection of Lazarus, The Annunciation, Resurrection of Lazarus, Birth of Christ, Trinity, Archangel Michael, Paul the Apostle, The Redeemer. The final scene crossfades from the icons and shows four horses at a river during rain.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060107/

Café Lumière (2003)

AKA 珈琲時光 (Kōhī Jikō)

Directed by
Hsiao-hsien Hou

Writing credits
Hsiao-hsien Hou
T'ien-wen Chu

The story revolves around a young Japanese woman (played by Hitoto Yo) doing research on Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-Ye, whose work is featured on the soundtrack. The late composer's Japanese wife and daughter also make appearances as themselves.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412596/