Tag: Jean-Louis Trintignant

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Animation Features Movies

The Most Precious
of Cargoes
(La Plus Précieuse
des Marchandises)

Director – Michel Hazanavicius – 2024 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

*****

In Winter in a forest, a poor woodcutter’s wife rescues an abandoned baby thrown from a passing train and, despite her husband’s misgivings, raises the girl as her own – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 4th

Once upon a time… In the woods through which many trains pass… In a war… Yes, that war… In Winter, when everything is under snow… The wife (voice: Dominique Blanc from La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1994; Indochine, Régis Wargnier, 1992) of a poor woodcutter, unable to have children, is outside and prays to the Gods of the Trains. Whether they hear her and look upon her kindly, or whether they even exist, it’s impossible to say. Following her prayer, however, she hears the sound of a baby crying. How did the baby get there? Well, unbeknownst to the woman, a man in a goods wagon threw it out of a passing train. She locates the baby girl, takes it home, feeds it. It’s the child she never had.

Her husband, the woodcutter (voice: Grégory Gadebois from Everything Went Fine, François Ozon, 2021; Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius, 2017), on returning home, discovers the baby and is furious.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Three Colours: Red
(Trois Couleurs: Rouge)

Director – Krzysztof Kieślowski – 1994 – France – Cert. 15 – 99m

*****

An up-and-coming model strikes up a friendship with a retired judge after her car accidentally runs over his dog one night – 4K restoration is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 14th

This represents the third part of a trilogy based on the three colours of the French national flag, with each film representing one of that nation’s three values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood). I interviewed Kieślowski for this back in 1994, the second time I’d interviewed him. The first was in 1993 for Three Colours: Blue.

Like Three Colours: Blue and Three Colours: White before it, Three Colours: Red is about human connection or lack of it. As if to underscore the point, it starts off with an international phone call which fails to connect. In a nod to Dial M For Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953) where a phone call is shown via images of telephony, little mechanisms springing into brief action to make a phone call happen, Kieślowski has his camera race along telephone cables on the ground, at one point following them down a beach into the sea and out again onto land on the other side of a lake or ocean.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Krzysztof Kieślowski
talks about
Three Colours: Red

Transcript of interview from 1994 when Kieślowski was promoting Three Colours: Red. At the time, the other two films in the trilogy had by then been screened to press.

You intend to make no more films after Red. So what do you plan to do now?

“I want to live.”

What about artistic – or other – work of any sort?

“No, I can’t say.”

When we spoke about Blue, you told me how in many ways you found literature more interesting than film making. We discussed Blind Chance in terms of the conditional imperfect tense. Red seems similar out of the whole body of his work – closer to Blind Chance than anything else.

“Yes, maybe, in a certain general way of thinking, in construction.”

Not in the sense of three parallel “what if?”s, but more – if one comes at Red from a literary perspective – as a conditional tense.

“No, I don’t think it’s conditional. In fact I think it would be quite difficult to find a literary explanation there. That sort of thing I think has been tried out and discovered by the cinema rather than literature. Of course, it has been used in literature, but it’s a very much more suited to film than it is to fiction.… Read the rest