Successful and Unsuccessful Mourning in Kieslowski's 'Three Colours'
Paola Golinelli

The capacity to work through mourning implies emotional maturity,  since primary mourning forms the basis of human psychism and it also enables us to cope with inevitable mourning in the future. On the contrary, when denial is at work, physical and psychic survival seems to be bound to the invention of an inner feeling of omnipotence/ impotence, forever exposed to the risk of trauma. Trauma is intended here as an event that provokes a psychic reorganisation for better or worst. The Ego again experiences Hilflosigkeit, i.e. the incapacity to cope with an amount of inner and outer excitement so strong as to be capable of breaking the protective shield (Freud 1926). On the other hand, the paradox which is inherent in trauma, that  it "first, cannot be forgotten and second, must be forgotten" (Freud 1934/38) may bring about a new interpretation of the past. Meditating the unresolved knots of one's own existence may produce a change from a negative perspective towards an area of shared enjoyment, to re-discover the beauty of the Self and the object, lost in the psychic rebellion against mourning (Freud 1915). Instead, when the damage suffered exceeds one's capacity for working through, denial seems the only way to escape the knowledge that one is confronted with an impossible psychological task. This may reach the stage where the damage itself is seen not to exist or if it does exist, it can be changed into personal success. The narcissistic wound suffered is therefore transformed into a triumph, through which trauma is enclosed within a circle of personal omnipotence, making it an obsessively controlled experience (Goretti 1997). In such a world the omnipotent maternal dyad never loses its fascination and the object becomes more one of usage that one of love. The creation of a possible object relation is stifled by a perverse dimension which shapes the other according to the needs of the subject and, through denial and splitting, uses it as a repository for one's own psychic rejection (Racamier 1992).

Three colours: White, Red, Blue (1993) is the last trilogy of the late Polish director K.Kieslowski. The director's declared purpose is to revisit the three principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. However, much as in an analytic sequence, behind the stories of "ordinary" suffering, there lies the psychic working through which the protagonists must carry out in order to give meaning to their lives, overwhelmed by separation and  loss. The main characters in the Trilogy react in different ways to the loss and pain in their lives.

The first film in the trilogy, Blue (1993), deals with the theme of freedom, considered as inner freedom from grief and the memory of the past. Julie, the protagonist, goes through the itinerary that leads her from the sensorial dimension of the trauma of bereavement , to the working through of the mourning, towards a new dimension of creativity and inner freedom.

She loses her husband, a famous composer, and her small daughter in a car accident and she is seriously injured herself. After her physical recovery, she abandons her beautiful home and belongings for an anonymous flat in Paris where she lives alone. First a neighbour, a young prostitute, and then her husband's assistant, who loves her, and finally the discovery that her husband had a lover who was pregnant bring her back to life.

At the very start of the film, the eyes of Julie, played by Juliette Binoche, seem to penetrate and merge with the camera lens to incorporate the spectator in the exasperation of trauma. The traumatic accident has reopened old wounds and compelled her to question the mental adjustment she had achieved. She has assumed the unselfish role of a person who gives generously, expecting nothing for herself in return. So marked was this role that people began to suspect that she had written the music her husband was famous for. Now she needs to deal with the traumatic core of her personality, that is: if she has nobody to give to, she may lose the confines of her identity. Indeed she must start again from the very beginning, passing through that affectivity she tried to erase, in order to protect herself now from the traumatic car accident, and, in the past, from her unconscious fantasy. A masochistic trait of Julie's character appears as a reaction-formation of altruism, revealing the bond to a grandiose, primitive, despotic object. This could push her towards malignant regression (Stewart 1994), entrapping her in a dangerous dimension of narcissism and delusion, where suicide might appear an attractive solution. She first attempts suicide in hospital soon after the accident. Later, she seems tempted every time she dives into the blue swimming pool, where she swims, searching at a time for a sensorial embrace  which could restore her narcissistic integrity damaged by the trauma ( according to auto-sensuality by Tustin).

Blue is a fine thread that all along the film helps her not to lose herself and enables her little by little to revive. Julie passes through all the forms of working through of mourning, from the more archaic introjection of the object itself (Freud 1915), when she devours with a racking pain her daughter's blue lollipop to incorporate the lost object, to projective identification, when the old housekeeper weeps, because she cannot.

When Julie is forced to witness the seduction scene between the prostitute and her customer, then the aspects connected with drives put her in contact with her soothed affectivity. This resembles a revised edition of the parents' coupling, which revives her infantile jealousy, a powerful antidote to depression. Her relationship with the young prostitute, whom Julie protects by refusing to sign a petition to evict her, constitutes her first attempt since the accident to form an object relation.

Through the prostitute, Julie again comes into contact with her more genuine split aspect, one she had previously neglected. Finally she is able to see the photos of her husband's betrayal. She accepts she has to deal with her feelings of jealousy for the oedipal exclusion and she takes up her own creativity. By hiding behind her altruism, Julie had silenced her infantile needs for dependence, but she has been cruelly compelled to face the terrible guilt of not having protected her small daughter Anna. This strikes at the core of her maternal function, being the idealised core of her identity. On the contrary, by acknowledging her jealousy for her pregnant rival, she is able to reconstruct a parental couple capable of protecting her, unlike the idealised couple of her husband and herself that constituted a repetition of the idealised parental couple of her infancy. At a deep level, she acknowledges her rival, symbolically the mother of her infancy, as the legitimate wife of her father, the mother of a child of that father.

A trauma that could have pushed her towards self destruction, actually worked as a trigger for a new mental structure. She becomes sensitive to Olivier’s love and together they write the concert that will be performed for Europe. She has succeeded avoiding the fearsome prospect of adding a new loss to what she had already lost. As far as she takes up a new confidence in her own creativity, she gains the right to a new life.

It would appear that what Julie works through in the movie, Kieslowski works through in his Trilogy. In White (1994), we witness the retrieval of the most revengeful, primitive and persecutory aspects, which find resolution in a perverse attitude towards the object.

The movie starts with scenes of Karol and his wife getting divorced in Paris. He is proclaimed impotent and stripped of all his papers and possessions. Reduced to poverty, with the help of a compatriot he returns to Poland, where  he reaches his brother's home exhausted, on foot. There, he slowly begins to recover and starts work with his brother as a ladies’ hairdresser. Poland in the era of post-totalitarianism is undergoing great social and political changes, which coincide with those experienced by Karol. Taking full advantage of a society that is searching for a new identity, he becomes a property speculator without too many scruples and accumulates riches and power, so that  he can stage his own death and frames his wife, who has come back to Poland attracted by the mirage of his large inheritance. She is found guilty of murder and sent to prison.

Losing his pitiless wife represents a trauma that makes Karol’s question his very identity. Nationality seems to be the only element of it left. Indeed at a different level, the key point of his identity is the symbiotic fraternal ties they set up together with the compatriot, a revival of Karol's childhood fraternal bond. The compatriot and his brother become the pivots of his salvation: the former gives him the chance to return home, the latter provides him with the "maternal" care he needs. Both of them testify to an uncertain, chaotic world that has lost its feminine maternal holding and fatherly authority and is based on a relationship of mutual use: his brother needs him, because he is a good ladies’ hairdresser; his compatriot needs him to shoot him. Karol falls into denial to avoid protracting his feelings of impotence at being unable to avoid the humiliation of divorce and economic ruin. From this point on, he creates a perverse scenary ( J.Mc. Dougall 1982), where everything becomes possible: distinctions of time no longer exist, neither do the limitations of law and ethics. He lives by plotting sophisticated revenge, constructing a fantasy of retaliation that enables him to conquer the object which causes him pain. However, it prevents him from achieving equality and identification. Equality in White is, in fact, a negative quality, like the white of the narrative scenes that deny the variety of other colours. In the same way Karol denies what has happened, by stubbornly planning, an intricate strategy to overcome his sense of humiliation by regaining everything he lost: money, wife, and sexual prowess. In the meantime, the camera focuses on a perpetually snowbound landscape, a metaphor for Karol's frozen affects. If, as Francis Bacon (1597) affirmed, vendetta is a form of primitive justice, Karol, by seeking vengeance, fulfils his infantile desire of punishing a discontinuous and enigmatic maternal figure; a maternal figure which holds the absolute power of receiving or abandoning him, as cruelly and incomprehensibly as his wife abandoned him in an alien Paris.

The only object Karol saves from his disastrous period in Paris is a small plaster cast of a female head, his last fetishistic connection with an idealised image of feminine beauty. When it falls and shatters, he quits his job as a ladies’ hairdresser. The illusion of styling women's hair no longer satisfies his craving to be the creative force behind a woman's head. His uncertain and traumatic relationship which constantly exposes him to the risk of abandon is replaced by a sadomasochistic bond, which will tie him to his wife forever. At the end of the film, he says goodbye to the imprisoned woman from outside. He has succeeded in exerting an omnipotent control over her, but he cannot have her. Both parties seem to use pain as an instrument of control and seduction (Freud 1919). It is, in fact, preferable to have a constant, even omnipotent, cruel object, rather than a kind and nurturing object that can be lost. Better a destroyed object than a lost one.

Red (1994) is not only the last in the Trilogy, but also Kieslowski's last film. Owing to the circumstances, it represents a kind of spiritual testament by the director who, like the old judge in the movie, by acknowledging the  revengeful and perverse voyeristic elements of his actions, reaches inner reconciliation and is able to save his own artistic creations. They represent in fact his regained capacity to accept the multifaceted aspects of life and art, overcoming both the persecutory aspects of White and the idealisation of Blue.

The plot is an interlacing of crossed destinies. A young model runs over a female dog and takes care of it. Through this event, she meets a retired former judge who leads a lonely, misanthropic existence, spending his days tapping his neighbours’ phone calls. In the meantime, a young judge discovers his fiancé’s betrayal. After meeting the model, the former judge decides to give himself up to the police. He offers to look after the female dog and her puppies and encourages the model to cross the Channel to reach her fiancé. The girl and the young betrayed judge meet on the ferry, which is shipwrecked in a  storm. All the passengers, except the seven characters in the Trilogy, perish. The old judge's meeting with the model, a beautiful and compassionate woman, awakens his desire to recover a dimension of affectivity he had previously prevented himself from experiencing, one of protection and care for others. His life has been spent in resentment for the betrayal of the woman he loved and in guilt for perverting the course of justice against his rival and for the accidental death of his fiancé. The betrayal represented a traumatic event which provoked a perverse regression. By forcing himself to see and listen to other people’s calls, each time he revives the humiliation suffered as a young man while chasing after his woman and her lover over the Channel and planning his revenge. His meeting with the model, who shows concern for him, puts him again in contact with his affects. He recuperates the healthy aspect of his Super-Ego, which he had corrupted, perverting his capacity to listen as an impartial judge and removing sympathy for human suffering as well as the desire to do justice. At this stage, he can give himself up and allow himself a second opportunity for affectivity, which he could not experience before, reliving his own love story in that of the young betrayed judge.

At the end of the movie, the storm which provokes the wreck of the ferry boat in the Channel, appears as a cultural reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The former judge, like Prospero, unleashes the storm perhaps because of his jealousy, ditched by the model in favour of her fiancé. Yet the revival of the trauma has a different outcome. The old judge/ alias Kieslowski saves the seven characters of the Trilogy, leaving them the task of testifying that freedom of affect is the real one.

We, the spectators, enjoy the comforting "happy ending" as if it were the director’s dream. With Fellini’s style, he reviews his movies and the characters he has created and saves them all, to represent that part of humanity which preserves the capacity to love and protect.

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Copyrights © P Golinelli 2000