As mentioned at the end of the last segment, there are only three segments of “Red” to go … and in this one, not a whole lot happens. Which makes it a good spot to take a breath and discuss the actor who plays Joseph, Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Before he passed away three years ago, Trintignant acted in an astounding 162 films. The movie social platform Letterboxt allows you to perform stats on a wide variety of things, including the lists you create. I’ve made a top 150 personal favorite films, and Letterboxd informed me that Trintignant starred in four of them: Red, The Comformist, Z and My Night at Maud’s. He was astounding in each, but I never connected that it was the same actor in those films, that’s how good he is, he disappeared into roles.

He’s also in a movie that I have not seen — Amour, a film about any aging couple that has to deal with the consequences of their fading health. His co-star in that movie is Emmnuelle Riva, who you might remember as Jule’s mother with Alzhemer’s in Three Colours: Blue, and the star of another of my favorite films, Hiroshima mon Amour.

Connections and coincidences abound, just as in the Kieslowski world. This section is all about the various strands of life becoming entangled to the point where the characters sense that there’s a certain mystical design at play.

Joseph begins this segment by calling the weather phone number of the woman who betrayed the young judge. He asks for the weather on the English Channel for the next several days — looking out for Valentine. The woman on the phone tells him that it will be beautiful, placid weather and she will be in the channel herself, she will be going sailing with her boyfriend. This both confirms the judge’s suspicions and psychical connects her to that sailor who he wrongfully acquitted in an early story.

Next is something I find extremely disturbing — we see Auguste pull up his car to a post next to the Lake, tie up his cute black dog and leave it there. In a sense, this ties him to his generational twin, Joseph, who began the movie by neglecting his dog. And we will see a bit later that Joseph changes his mind, which is a good thing, because this kind of animal cruelty is unforgivable, a far worse ethical act that cheating on a partner in a non-married relationship, in my personal opinion. I am far more forgiving of actions taken for pleasure than those done out of cruelty.

The subsequent scene takes place at a rehearsal for a fashion show. We see Valentine giving the name of someone to invite to the upcoming show — and we know it is Joseph, because the film then cuts to him, dressed up in a suit, getting into his Mercedes (which looks like it hasn’t left the garage in years) on his way to the show.

On his journey to the show, he sees Valentine’s massive chewing gum advertisement. The music in this segment, if it isn’t a direct copy of the montage segment from “Three Colours: Blue,” sounds an awful lot like it.

Now we get to the fashion show, with lots of dramatic reds and blacks, looking very early 90s. Valentine walks the runway. She seems distracted, appears to be looking for Joseph throughout, which at least to me gives off a vibe of her not doing her job well. No one seems to notice or complain.

Backstage, Valentine is taking off her makeup, interacting a bit with other models, mostly just looking pensive throughout. She then walks out behind a group of other models, giving the sense that she doesn’t fit in with, or purposefully separates herself from, the group. There, she sees Joseph. She tells him that she wants to say goodbye because she’ll be leaving tomorrow. He shakes her hand and says au revoir.

Valentine asks him about the dream he had about her. He doesn’t have many more details to add, just that she wakes up in 25 years or so next to a man, smiles and is happy. She wonders who the man is, but he doesn’t know.

Thinking that he has some mystical powers, she asks him what else he knows and who he is, as if she expects him to reveal himself as some kind of wizard or shaman. He answers simply: a retired judge. Valentine says that she feels like something important is happening around her, and it scares her. Joseph reached out a hand to comfort her and asks if that’s better.

The conversation will continue and take up the next segment of the film. It’s remarkable just how much of this movie consists of conversations between these two characters, and yet it feels so much larger and more connected than that.