Irène Jacob

In Three Colours: Red (1994), Irène Jacob’s Valentine gives the reclusive judge her attention without surrendering her own concerns. There is concentration in her kindness, and no expectation that we should applaud her merely for being good. Her openness keeps the encounter approachable even when Jean-Louis Trintignant makes the man opposite her forbidding. We rate this performance so highly because Valentine stays interesting without having to become less decent.

Her first film part was a piano teacher in Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants (1987). The international breakthrough came with Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991), playing Weronika and Véronique. Her ability to convey emotional uncertainty with little dialogue made her well suited to his films, and Red was their second collaboration. She then moved into English-language work as Desdemona in Othello (1995) and Marie in U.S. Marshals (1998). She also continued to work in European films and theatre.

The friendship in Red depends on Jacob resisting the easy version of this part. A model who befriends a withdrawn judge could become little more than a reward for his suffering, and she keeps Valentine’s separate life in view. We were moved by their encounters because she remains a person with needs of her own, while Trintignant makes the difficulty of caring about somebody else visible. The film can be insistent about its coincidences; Jacob gives us a person worth following through them.

Piotr Sobociński’s cinematography sometimes pulls our attention elsewhere, using colour, camera movement and the placement of actors to make us inspect an encounter closely. Claude Lenoir’s production design encourages the same scrutiny, and the care is occasionally distracting. We find ourselves examining the surroundings for meaning when the two actors already have enough happening between them. Start with Red, and watch Jacob as closely as the film invites us to watch its carefully arranged surroundings.