The Blue Room

not an ordinary adaptation. the spirit of many contemporary French films. Mathieu Amalric using same tools to build his character. a Simenon in different manner. a cold film about relationship and decisions, about guilty and events who has a strange touching manner to surprise the viewer not for evolution of events but for the attitudes of characters. a film of silence and guilty out of facts. because it preserves the Greek mark of destiny, the poetry of things, the emotions as a kind of fog. nothing clear, each detail as part of a sort of ambiguity and slow rhythm of events. a film with a specific target who could seems be boring for many. but useful with few drops of patience. and with a crumb of interest for Simenon universe.

The Blue Room is a French crime drama based on a novel of the same name by Georges Simenon and is directed by the lead actor, Mathieu Amalric. The film opens up in what is later revealed to be a flashback where the main character, Julien (played by Amalric), a married man, recalls his sexual experience with a woman (played by Stephanie Cleau) in a hotel room to the police. Julien is being accused of a crime that he doesn't apparently know anything about. As the film continues, and we go further and further into the story, we find out what actually did happen between this man and woman, as well as, the relationship between this man and his wife, eventually leading to a court case.

The movie's most interesting elements are its story structure, told in flashback, and its use of its musical score. One of my favorite scenes concerns Julien trying to burn some papers and they slowly vanish into the darkness of the ocean. The way this scene is filmed and framed, being intentionally slow, made it very interesting from a filmmaking standpoint.

The musical score is often bombastic, and scenes that aren't really meant to be dramatic carried a melodramatic theme. The score itself goes through different phases, from the very dramatic, to the mysterious, scary and even intimidating. The best use of the score in the film is during a court scene where we see people doing various things all at once. The background piano music fits the theme of this scene particularly well.

This film has good acting from its lead actors and lovely cinematography. If you like stories of adultery and crime, you will not be disappointed, however I found that the film wasn't particularly memorable or anything special overall.

This is a story from which one can see how desperately poor French justice system is. Their policemen are notori ous, but potential for injustice is even worse. In a small French village provincial town, a couple unsuccessfully tries to hide their affair. A family man is caught into adultery in a leg-web by cold and predatory female lover who had a crush on him since high school, but because of the rigid class system he never approached her. She contorts a way to get him between her spread legs (expl icitly shown several times), and replace her unloved but well off dying husband. She is married into pharmacy, and when a husband dies it is unclear if foul play is at play. But her mother in law has no doubts and decides to avenge her offspring by poisoning his son wife lover's family via convenient fact that they get plum jam from her. Weather the depiction of the obnoxiously unjust and plain stup id court and investigation system of France is realistic (and yes, it is that horrible, if not even more so, especially if you are a minority, and police is even worse), this is a stylistic attempt to say something about passion and such things. But toxic femininity - French way, wins the day, and a confused male victim, who is not manly enough to counter the horrible forces of female venom in all its editions, gets destroyed. His leggy lover, guilty or not (point a bit moot) fares better, as in her feminine mind she won them a life together as lifetime jailbirds if not lovebirds. Horrible - if only for a system, that convicts based on close to zero evidence, maximum prejudice and Gallic investigative incompetence, is an insult to intelligence - but in France, incompetence and arrogance go hand in hand together with a solid web of sensationalistic tabloid press and trial by ordeal level of judicial primi tivism. In addition, French provincialism has not changed much from the time of "The Raven", brilliant portrayal of true French mentality that remains unchanged at least from their glorious Vichy days circa 1943.

This is exactly the kind of movie which grows on you.Based on a Simenon book , the story could have descended towards the banalities of the love triangle , a situation we've been told so many times here there and everywhere.That the opening scene may be very hot does not help for that matter.

Mathieu Amalric is fully aware of this ;his film looks like a jig saw puzzle ,with a very smart construction . When his film begins ,the die is cast :it's a long questioning by policemen and judges ; all the tragedy is told little by little, with flashbacks and portraits of the characters alive of dead : Almaric does not even fall in the trap of sentimentality : this is amour fou,in the fullest sense of the term ,but the characters are not really endearing : Esther is a selfish unsympathetic attractive woman who "waits-deadpan- for her sick husband to die " and one cannot blame her mother-in-law 's petulant attitude .The same goes for her lover -not so handsome ,after all - who 's got everything going for him ,a loving wife -with whom the viewer has a tendency to side, mainly when he knows the truth ,a cute child ,a desirable dwelling -one of the envious men calls it a b......t house during the trial- and thriving business.

This looks like a news item : one has the odd feeling of discovering the affair day by day ,with new revelations ; and Amalric deserves a bouquet for sparing us a looooong trial with the de rigueur brilliant lawyer : in this context ,it would be totally irrelevant : amour fou can't be explained ,period.

Slow moving (although only 76 minutes long), starting in the middle of confusion and sexual passion, and only very gradually revealing exactly what the central mystery being examined even is. All we know is that middle-class Julien (expertly played by director Amalric) and sexy, cold and intense Esther (the excellent Stephanie Cleau) have tremendous sexual chemistry, if not much real emotion between them. They are both married to other people, and we soon learn something awful has happened that has caused Julien to be under intense questioning by the police. All the other details are only revealed bit by bit as the story jumps around through a fractured time-scape.

Amalric uses the camera to underline and echo elements of the tricky construction, using odd, disquieting close ups that give us only a bit of the big picture, or pulling back to beautifully framed but distant feeling wider shots that give us the geography, but don't let us inside. The performances too – both by the leads and all the supporting characters – also serve the style. They're all dense and meticulously detailed, but it's up to us to figure out what those subtle details of behavior mean. Is that glance a look of love? Desire? Contempt? Does Julien's lawyer believe him? Does Julien's wife suspect or not?

If ultimately this adaptation of a Georges Simenon piece isn't quite as powerful as it's opening leads one to hope, it's still a smart, chilling and impressive directorial effort for Amalric.