Can somebody please explain the ending to me .... ? :-)

The main characters we were following all shared the same fate; they survived the ferry disaster. This is a revelation of its own. The reason Kieslowski shows us this reinforces why we were being shown their lives. The parallel image of the model is just a great shot. Lasting art and finite flesh merging. I don't know. I might be talking out of my butt. Love the movies though, especially RED!!!

"Nice beaver!"
"Thanks, I just had it stuffed."--The Naked Gun

I saw in the DVD special features, a film professor talking about how one couple from each film was saved, like a "noah's arc", which gives hope about the future of these characters, and as these characters are a metaphor to mankind, this means that it gives hope to ourselves and our own future

The Red film is about Fraternity (Brotherhood). When the 3 couples are finally united together by narrowly escaping death, both with each other and also as a group after their individual struggles. The way Kieslowski does it is brilliant by using the real life ferry disaster. The image of the poster is also very moving because it foreshadowed Valentines future after the young lawyer sees her from his car, as did the dream description. Everything in the 3 films was building up to this one moment when they were rescued from their ordeal and the couples managed to unite.

Personally I thought the ending was the old Judge's dream. He is dreaming he is a young man who meets Valentine. The other couples are there because we are learning that White and Blue were also just the Judge dreaming about these couples. Remember his life now is fixated with spying upon other people. Perhaps he read the story of Julie in Blue, and remembers Dominique in White from her court appearance, and just made up the stories about them in his previous dreams. So in Red, he is now combining all his three colour dreams into one final fantasy ending. This would make sense because his pessimism of life in France is mirrored in the critique of liberty, equality, and fraternity we see in the films.

I.S. Oxford

"The books have nothing to say!"
-- Fahrenheit 451

Judge says to Valentine that "you are the women i have never met"..and the same case too happening to the younger Judge..he was after a cheating lover of him, does not notices his apt pair (Valentine) staying next to his appartment

Meanwhile Valentine too had a doubty lover who replies "i think so" to the question when Valentine asks him "do you love me"..

Keislovski in my opinion is dealing with the matching couples (exact and apt pair). This is an amazingly optimistic movie, which conveys there somewhere an exact match is waiting for all of us...which we does not usually notices or sees..and finally ending up in a shaky relationship...

i haven't seen "blue" but i've seen "red" and "white", and i think they may have been on that ferry in the beginning. maybe they all met up in there and the stories we saw in the trilogy were the after events..

At the end of the "Red", Julie (the woman from the "Blue") is mentioned as a widow who lost her husband last year. So, the "Red" story happens a year after the "Blue" story. But, Julie appears at Karol's trial a few days after the death of her husbant. So, the "White" story had happened before the sinking of the ship and Karol is with Dominik (don't know if they are married). I want to explain that the "Red" film has to be watched after the others...

All stories have to stop somewhere, and I consider it more honest when a storyteller does that rather than painting a "happy ending". Life goes on, it isn't fundamentally transformed, but the story does tell us about events that changed the characters. Here, Valentine and August have a near death experience - the miraculous survival of a disaster. That isn't climactic enough for you. The other point is that obviously they are thrown together, and if the judge's dream is actually a prophecy, then he is the one with whom she will wake up happy when she is older. Valentine may be a woman who has all sorts of things going for her, but spiritually she is in a rut. She even says to the judge that she feels that important things are happening to her. She meets the judge and is deeply impressed by the experience of getting to know him, she obviously realizes her boyfriend is an abusive creep, and she is thrown together with August. Seems like a pretty clear resolution to me.

About the poster, to me it just fits in with the theme running through the film that people's fate is hinted at in so many ways before it happens. I'm not endorsing that view, but I think that is what he was getting at. She is a model who is told to strike a tragic pose (I believe the photographer was telling her to think of something terrible happening), and in her life that pose becomes a reality - life imitating art.