Three Colors: Blue

How do we know what it is, essentially, that we liked about a movie? Which is to say, what do we come to know about this viewer who was affected? And what do we say of that experience, do we ascribe it outside of us? No, that's just a bunch of words.

This is what we have here, questions of memory and meaning. A woman as viewer of a movie taking spontaneous shape around her (played by Binoche as placid observer), that pokes holes in herself and provokes questions; finally overcoming it by being pulled forward by what was left incomplete in it.

A woman who has lost everything as the film begins, every anchor in her life violently removed in one swoop and she's now cast adrift. We have the whole film as her own inner drift through an interminable flow. Kieslowski evokes this with lush dissonance between visual segments, cuts and fades that leave life in suspense. There is scant story, all about living with these fragments. Music erupts around her in sudden intervals; but music that's coming from inside of her and being hallucinated.

It's the world of memory and inner life. Tarkovsky enters this with long, mystifying sweeps of the camera that lift bearings and slip into dreams and ruminations. Kieslowski by contrast caresses their outline, the surface of emotions as they glide over the eyes. It's not difficult like Tarkovsky or Ruiz can be, but pleasant in the way of Kar Wai. It goes down rather easy, you can see it for just the surface shift.

Kieslowski had spent the whole 10 hours of the Dekalog training this ability to dream in advance. It pays off here. Each of the 10 Dekalogs was about a narrative that an earth-shattering revelation comes along and creates a change in viewing. You will see this here obviously. But Dekalog had a contrast; some of it was Kieslowski opening corridors in the imagining with his camera, most was characters stumbling into revelations and articulating feelings. Here I'm happy to note this tension is resolved in favor of the eye; the whole is about visual slippage through cracks in story.

He lets blue lights shine on screen as music soars in crescendos, he gives us closeup shots of eyes; the eye that colors. At other points he introduces memory as images before a viewer: the funeral playing on a screen, images of her husband on TV that when shuffled through reveal a mistress. Most eloquently, images on TV of someone being cast over a void with a bungee chord as her anxiously precarious drift with nowhere to hold. She's fading from even the mind of her mother.

For the end he reserves a tableaux of joined moments from lives as they are suspended briefly in mind. It's all being endlessly relived and combined like the music she works to complete with her composer friend. The music is central here.

Not just as the memory of what was collaboratively lived with her composer husband, the emotion that was absorbed and now erupts again, but also as the sheet where an incomplete piece beckons for the work of continued imagination. The shot of this sheet as scribbled notes end and lines stretch interminably is the abstract heart at the bottom of it.

Had another woman not made a copy of the score, it would have disappeared when she burnt it. Had she come by to pick up the photos of her husband, she might have burnt them with everything else and never found out about the mistress. But it's all this what eventually pulls her out of herself.

Blue is one of those little movies that grows on you. The more you think about it the more you like it. That's not to say that it's not enjoyable to view; the cinematography and music are marvelous. But this is Juliette Binoche's movie. Everything revolves around her character, Julie, who, in the first scene, survives an automobile accident that claims the lives of her famous composer husband and her five-year-old daughter. Now alone the remainder of the movie delves into Julie's long emotional recovery. Not traumatic, or depressing as the subject matter may imply it is instead subtle, graceful, and beautiful.

This movie is one of my favorites.

The disturbing topic of a woman who can't deal with the loss of her husband and child transforms into an essay on the impossibility of isolation. It is a quiet, personal movie that spends most of it's time with the main character played excellently by Juliette Binoche.

The color blue is very evident in the film,and a fade to a simple blue screen is used to show times of deep emotion. Although the characters are set in a specific time and place ( France just before the formation of the EU ) the focus on the personal journey of grief transcends the setting.

I like the way this film changes from a story about a death to an affirmation to life. I like the way that little things like mice in the apartment loom large in the thought of our main character, where as what others consider important such as finishing her husband's symphony seem very minor .

It feels like diving deep through cold dark water to finally swim toward the light. One passes through emotional turmoil to come out the other side. I found it a very satisfying.

TROIS COLOURES: BLEU is a rich, dark film with all the Kieslowski marks: death, silence, depression, and the inner torment of outwardly attractive women. After seeing the whole trilogy and the DEKALOG, I'm convinced at Kieslowski's great talent, and his very early death was a true blow to world cinema. Much like Kubrick but with a less ironic nature, Kieslowski loves to make his characters and stories both humanely distant, realistic, and, at the same time, philosophically idealist and dense. I enjoyed BLEU more than BLANC (which was an odd machismic entry in a trilogy mainly focusing on women) but not as much as ROUGE, which I feel is one of the finest, most beautiful, most well-done films I've ever seen.

More specifically, BLEU's focus seems to be on the relationship of a woman's loss of the tactile manifestation of her husband's existance with the ligering notions of his life - especially his music, which pervades the entire film, interrupting at key moments with a blackout and short blast of the overture. To watch Julie struggle with her husband's abandoned secrets (including a mistress Julie befriends) is shattering, frustrating, and perplexing.

Unfortunately, life must move, and, due to that, I can't watch BLEU over and over. However, I did glean from one viewing the complexity of this picture, and recognize its need to be watched over and over, until Kieslowski's last gasps can be properly understood, which is all we can hope to return to a man whose genius was tragically cut short, but still stands as a giant in my view of cinema.

BLEU (TROIS COLEURS) / France/Poland 1993 (4 STARS) 23 January 2004: The thing that stands out most about Blue is the expression (or lack there of) of grief. How does a woman, seemingly fulfilled by happiness, react when that happiness is yanked away in one telling moment, in a car accident in which both her husband and her daughter pass away? That is the central understudy - a strong woman's attempts at finding purpose in the seeming absence of meaning. • Mise-en-scene: I watched an interview with Juliette Binoche, where she mentions that Kieslowski refused to make the film unless it had her in it. It's easy to see why. I can't imagine Bleu without Juliette – its not just that she lends her personality to the film…Bleu IS Binoche.

• I was thrown off by the sub-plots of the character's relationships with her mother and the striptease dancer, as I was about the seeming resolution at the end of the film. There were perhaps references that I missed but the ‘almost happy' ending left me feeling un-relinquished. Given that I had shared such an intense journey with Julie, it seemed almost improper to accept that she would settle in to a normal relationship again.

• Cinematography: The 1st shot of the film - that of a car tire racing - shot from the bottom of the moving car establishes this as ‘not your typical movie'. The sequence-of-shots that follow eerily draw one into the compelling story-telling style of Krzysztof Kieslowski, minimalist in its approach, with a world communicated without dialogue in the first five minutes of the film. • Blue is not your typical art-house film. Its production values are up there with the best, and the cinematography by Slavomir Idziak (who's craft was recognized by Hollywood in Black Hawk Down), is nothing short of stunning. • The lighting is low key and soft, and wraps around the characters to create a mood of subtlety. A distinguishing feature is the detail in the shadows. None of the close-ups fully illuminate the protagonist, almost hinting at her vulnerability at facing the light, though the delicate use of eye-lights does well to bring alive her emotions. • The camera, an intelligently used narrative element, interacts with Julie and partakes in her emotions, respecting them and yet accentuating their intensity as she plods on in an alien world of deep personal purposelessness. The tight close-ups penetrate her soul and force us to delve into Julie's mind and share in her agony. • Editing: deftly uses match on action to create irony while forwarding the narrative. • Sound: The pace is hauntingly slow and silence has been used compellingly. It screams with meaning as it is becomes one of the more important elements as the narrative progresses. Bleu is not a film you can watch, consume and move on. Either you'll feel that you've totally wasted your time and will probably not be able to sit through (the pivotal occurrence is over within the first five minutes of the film without a single world being spoken, and the rest of the film is essentially the protagonist's psychologically subjective journey) or you'll realize by the time you've reached the end that you'll revisit this film at various points in time, explore and read about it, discuss it with people you respect, and try to get closer to the essence of Kieslowski. For there are two now well-accepted truths about the folklore surrounding Kieslowski, whose reputation continues to mount posthumously…1. that Kieslowski carefully interwove elements that were rich with meaning and social irony, and 2. that figuring those elements out and appreciating their implications is probably a lifelong learning process.