The role of the puppeteer?

I think the puppeteer it's a sort of allegory for some superior being that creates us, control our acts, "writes" our live, and keep us alive or discart us when we don't work anymore.

having known that Kieslowski was agnostic, I don't dare to say that Alexander it's an allegorical representation of God... but he does with his puppets what an almighty being could be doing with the lives of Weronika and Véronique.

It's a kind of "Demiurge". But don't get me wrong, he is just a puppeteer but it's also a metaphor for somebody or something bigger than us.

well, that's what I think. I might be completely wrong. I suppose that only Kieslowski knew what was his role and what he represented. The rest of us can only speculate about it.

This movie is wide open to interpretation. (But perhaps the biggest group of viewers in agreement with each other is those don't bother to interpret it at all!)

I don't like the puppeteer. In our first glimpse of him, he is already invading Veronique's space, as he prepares to do his show in one of the rooms where she normally teaches. Later he openly tells her that he wants to manipulate her. There are no positive signs that he has any insight into her life at all; eg, the beginning of his novel, which he reads to her, could have been based on nothing more than what she told him earlier in the hotel room.

The relationship between Weronika and her father seems clumsy but deeply affectionate to me. The one between Veronique and her father seems smooth but superficial and even inappropriate. I don't like him any more than the puppeteer. Eg, should a father walk out of a shower or bath wrapped in a towel and give his daughter a firm hug and kiss? There is a hint of incest here, or at least some degree of domineering behavior. There seems something ominous about the way he stops manipulating wood with his new machine and just stands there for a while, once he apparently realizes that someone has driven to his house.

Was that a car wreck or some sort of terrorist explosion? In any case, the damage to the car suggests danger. And wasn't it outside a travel bureau, suggesting travel by airplane and/or ship, as well as car and train? Thus various modes of transportation and terror/danger all appear in or are suggested by this long scene. One way to see this is that there are various means of transportation and escape around, but Veronique doesn't use any of them, when she should be doing what she can to escape the danger to her represented by the puppeteer.

Kieslowski is a bit like the puppeteer; he leaves a lot of clues that only make begin to make sense when you investigate them. The act of terrorism at Sawad Airlines is never explained in the movie, it's just another clue for Veronique. The nebbish guy who inexplicably sleeps with so many women and whom Veronique agrees to testify against is never explained, you're supposed to 'get it', or not. The woman with the hat who always gives Veronique the evil eye and appears to be stalking her is never explained. The last scene with her father in his woodshop and Veronique touching the tree is surreal, again you either eventually make sense of it or not. This is a style that makes his movies so haunting. After I first saw Three Colors Red it stuck in my mind for years until I got hold of the DVD and watched it compulsively over and over.

The car wreck explanation is rather simple and is given indirectly by Kiewslowski himself in an interview he made. It is the mirror image to the Polish demonstration when Weronika encounters herself. In both cases there's turmoil going on in the background related to politics of the country resulting in violence, yet in both cases it is of no concern to the protagonists. Kiewslowski wanted to make it clear that he's not interested in politics anymore and made his characters not react therefore.

Art's Top 100 Movies: http://www.imdb.com/list/e-VkvtHDDNQ/ - recommendations welcome!