Literary history, which sometimes inspires and doubles the history of cinema, pays great attention to the symbolism of colors in the unfolding of narrative action. A famous example is the famous novel The Red and the Black (1830), which is an in-depth chronicle of French society during the revolution. In this novel, the two colors are emblematic for the characters’ destinies, red symbolizing the military career for which Julien Sorel develops a real passion, while black is the ecclesiastical career. Regarding the female characters Madame de Renal and Mathilde de Mole, the author also resorts to this chromatic symbolism, in this case red representing love, excitement, passion and black representing misery, sickness, penance and, ultimately, death. Starting from this novel which was screened in countless versions, we intend to analyze the chromaticity of the French and Romanian films of the 1990s to 2000s, the shades ranging from white to black, with alternations of blue and gray, the color of ash, suggesting the atmosphere of the 1980s to 1999, respectively the Communist era, the fall of Communism and the transition period in films such as “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, “Asphalt Tango”, “Italiencele”, “The Snails’ Senator”, “Occident”, “12:08 East of Bucharest”, “The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu”, “Child's Pose”, etc.