by Lynn Lee

Transfixed. Transported. Exhilarated. These are words I don’t use lightly when I’m talking about movies, but they all apply to my reaction the first time I saw the final installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy. And in large measure they still do. Even if the initial wonder has given way to a comforting familiarity, few films capture the universal human yearning for connection and kinship as vibrantly yet delicately as this one.

I first saw Red some years after its initial release, at a special screening at the university I was attending. I went in knowing very little about the film except that the friend I went with had seen it before and spoke of it in glowing terms. He noted that in an ideal world I’d have seen the preceding chapters, Blue and White, but thought I’d enjoy Red even without having done so.