Simply 'Red'
Simply 'Red'
Jacob contributes personal color to new foreign film
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Staff
Irène Jacob is sitting on the couch in her suite in the Westwood Marquis. Slim and petite, she wears a cherry-colored sweater over a black skirt, an appropriate choice to promote her new film, Red.
In person, Jacob, 28, bears no trace of the melancholy she embodies as Red's heroine Valentine. The new release from Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and the final film in his Three Colors trilogy, Red has been warmly praised by critics, some of whom have suggested that in Jacob the director has found his muse.
Red is Jacob's second film with Kieslowski, and their collaboration has been fruitful. Their first film together, The Double Life of Veronique (1991), garnered critical laurels and a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize for Jacob.
Part of that success, explains Jacob, comes from the director's willingness to accept his actors' ideas. "When I read the first treatment, Valentine was a model, she was happy," she says in a gentle French accent.
"I thought, maybe we should find a something unsatisfying about her, so she has a longing to meet someone." Kieslowski agreed, and her suggestion was fortuitous. When Valentine inadvertently meets an older, retired judge, as lonely and isolated as she is, their building friendship takes on a resonance that the earlier draft would have lacked.
As the emotional core of Red, the conversations between Valentine and the judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) slowly develop tension only to break it down later. Kieslowski carefully coached his actors in rehearsal.
"Krzysztof would crouch near Jean-Louis and me, watching first one then the other, finding out where the tension was, what was at stake," she recalls. "He can adopt an idea at the last minute and transform it."
Another idea the director adopted involved the last shot in the film, in which all the characters from Blue, White and Red come together. In reality, that scene was shot after the director had finished Blue, the first film in the trilogy, and long before shooting on Red got underway. The final image of Red is a freeze-frame on Jacob's face in profile.
Sensing the power in that image, a sort of startled, faraway look, the director of photography suggested using that same shot for a chewing gum advertisement for which Valentine had posed for weeks earlier. Kieslowski agreed, and that image of Valentine came to take on a deeper, almost eerie meaning in the film. That same image is now the advertisement for Red.
Speaking about Red, Jacob demonstrates a passionate understanding of the director's intentions. "At the beginning of the film you don't know much about my character or the story," she says. "You think, 'what is this film about?' But then she has this confrontation with the judge, and she is surprised to be so provoked by someone she had really nothing to with."
Although Valentine is at first repelled by the judge, she returns to speak to him and eventually comes to trust him. "She starts to like the judge when he opens himself to her, he gives her something. It's the first time someone has done this with her," Jacob says. "And she finds that she reveals herself to him as well."
Is Valentine anything like Irène Jacob? She pauses before answering. "Well, she is supposed to be something like all of us.
"This film is a dialogue between the youthful part of ourselves that hopes, that expects things, that believes in things, which is Valentine, and the part of us that experiences pain, disappointment in our hopes, betrayal and cynicism, which is the judge," Jacob says. "I think we are supposed to recognize ourselves in Valentine and in the judge as well."
In Red, the judge is closely mirrored in a young man, a judge himself, who seems a perfect companion for Valentine but whom she keeps missing.
Although Kieslowski has found a successful collaboration with Jacob, he is not the only director to have discovered her talents. She made her first film, Au Revoir Les Enfants, with Louis Malle, and she has worked with Jacques Rivette in La Band des Quatre.
"The experience of finding good directors, good scripts, is very lucky for an actor, because we don't do this profession alone. We are dependent on successful collaboration," she says.
Jacob, who is Swiss, now lives in Paris. She has worked outside of western Europe, recently completing All Men Are Mortal in Budapest opposite Stephen Rea, and Victory with Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe in Malaysia.
"I think it's very interesting to confront different cultures," she says. "I enjoy this very much." Her next project is A Bee In the Clouds, one of a series of five short films directed by Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Although she stands on the brink of international fame, Jacob has little desire to work in Hollywood.
"Hollywood as a concept doesn't mean so much to me. I involve myself with a script, with a director, if the film seems right. I choose my work because of the project, not because of a certain amount of money."
That distinctly European attitude toward filmmaking has guided Jacob toward the right projects so far. If she continues to follow her instincts, this striking young actress will have a long and fertile career ahead. It's a good bet that Red is just one of many colors in her palette.
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