Das blaue Zimmer

about desire. about the role of the other. about flesh and love and hidden by yourself sins, about the search of yourself and about the fall of a night.about justice. a film who mix, in wise manner, the seduction with fascination. a work of beauty and dark secrets and images of victims and fragile intentions. it could be the film of Mathieu Amalric. like many of his films because he has the science and the gift to propose the right solution for the tone of story. because it is a film of details, about a not special event, in which the states of characters remains the only significant thing. so, a film who must see. for the acting first. then, for atmosphere.

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.

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.

The Blue Room" (2014 release from France; 76 min.) brings the story of a man and a woman. As the movie opens, we hear the moans and whispers of a couple making love. Turns out to be Julie and Delphine. Pretty soon we come to understand that they are married, but not to each other. Delphine whispers to Julien: "Imagine what our days could be like, if we ran away". Little does she know what is to come... Just a few minutes into the movie, we then jump to the present day, where Julien is being interrogated at the police station, but we don't know why. To tell you more of the movie's plot would surely spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: first, this movie is based on the book of the same name by famed Belgian crime writer Georges Simeon (he died some 25 years ago). This prolific author has written dozens and dozens of crime novels, and many have been made into a movie. (I grew up in Belgium in the 70s, and he had the reputation of a giant.) Second, this movie is very much a labor of love for French actor Mathieu Amalric, who not only plays the lead role of Julien, but also directed the movie. Third, as the movie started out, I thought that this might be a "Fatal Attraction"-type movie, but as it turns out this is very much a police and court drama. A huge chunk of the movie plays out in the interrogations at the police station, even though it is interwoven with plenty of flashbacks as to what exactly happened. For those of you not familiar with the continental European criminal justice system, you will be in for a few extra surprises, as the differences with the American criminal justice system are profound. Also noteworthy is the very unusual screen ratio (almost but not quite 1:1). Last but not least, there is an outstanding orchestral score to the movie, composed by Gregoire Hetzel, and I only wish it was used more extensively in the movie (there are long sections where no score is used).

"The Blue Room" opened without any pre-release hype or fanfare at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati in late October/early November (it only played a week). The early evening screening where I saw this at was not well attended (less than 10 people) but frankly I was surprised there were even that many people for this. Bottom line: I thought that "The Blue Room" was a nice change of pace from the crime dramas that we are used to in the US. If you like French movies with lots of talking and not much 'action' per se, I'd readily recommend you check this out.

Mathieu Amalric isn't one to shy away from a risky project—has anybody seen the film where he plays a shrink and Benicio Del Toro's a Blackfoot WWII vet with PTSD? Here he and his real-life partner, Stéphanie Cléau, co-star in a stripped-down 75' adaptation of a Simenon story of erotic obsession and justice gone awry. The fine performances and the film's time-shuffling structure help maintain a high level of suspense at least past the halfway mark, though it seems to me that Amalric and Cléau, who also wrote the script, might have thrown a little too much of Simenon's backstory out with the bathwater.

The plodding inquiry that begins even before we know a crime has been committed certainly explains Julien's (MA's character's) air of glum fatalism through the second half of the film, but the script's intense focus on the two lovers doesn't prepare us for the final courtroom scene, in which a character we've barely seen before steps into the spotlight. (I'm planning to watch again to test the hypothesis, suggested by some online reviewers, that the crime the protags are charged with was committed by someone else…)

The courtroom scene has a nightmarish quality, like one of Hitchcock's "wrong man" films; the trial itself seems like an open-mic session where gossipy townsfolk step up to air their gripes about the defendants—one witness dismisses Julien's stylish modernist house as a "crappy little shack." There's certainly a disconnect between Simenon's view of blind, blundering justice and our own no doubt idealized police procedurals and courtroom dramas; I agree with other reviewers that Julien would have excellent grounds for appeal on the basis of blatant judicial bias and ineffective counsel.