Trois couleurs: Bleu

Often times when viewing an intelligent film like this I have to really contemplate what the implications the film maker making mean to me. This film was no exception. Kieslowski, with his background in non-fiction film making, is applying the french political value of liberty to a personal situation. He is, in essence, studying the human condition through fiction. The meaning of "liberty" takes on a very different meaning for Julie in this film. She tries to gain liberty from her memories and her emotions only to find that it is an impossible task. This is not a film to casually throw on after supper. This film requires a commitment by the audience to really consider Kieslowski's implications, for he is telling us (throughout this trilogy) what he thinks makes a "good" person. The score is beautiful and has a character of its own in the plot. A must see for true film lovers but perhaps a little too much for someone expecting a casual encounter.

Krzysztof Kieslowski is, unquestionably, the master of the visual narrative.

More-so than even La Double Vie de Veronique (which is much more poetic than linear in it's structure), Trois Couleurs: Bleu is a marvel of visual exposition. Due to the nature of the film, exposition in this case is not necessarily related to plot, but rather to the understanding of a human being.

Kieslowski delves so deeply into the true nature of Julie (Juliette Binoche) and in such a remarkable way that by the end of the film we understand her utterly. Free from the clutter of dialogue and, for the most part, interaction with other characters we see Julie alone and in her most natural state. Kieslowski takes his documentary background and conveys his character in an almost voyeuristic manner. Showing Julie in anything but a state of solitude would be false; due to human nature Julie with Oliver would not be Julie, but rather a reflection of her true self which, although certainly interesting, pales in comparison to observing her silently struggle with the death of her husband and daughter alone.

Kieslowski played with applying the documentary techniques, which he perfected in his early work, to the narrative form in The Dekalog with tremendous, although at times visually mundane, results. The Dekalog looks like a documentary. Here, he turns over much visual control to his Director of Photographer, Slawomir Idziak, with tremendously cinematic results. Idziak's use of color and light, combined with his groundbreaking filter work, serve to further explore Julie's character. Blue feels like a documentary and looks like a dismal Rembrandt. While Kieslowski concentrates on showing the true nature of Julie through action, Idziak contributes by showing her through light and color.

Trois Couleurs: Blue is an almost unmatched achievement in the history of cinema. Never before has a character been conveyed so splendidly and in such a visually stunning manner.

Instead of saying which is the best and worst (though have often heard 'Red' cited best and 'White' the weakest, though all three films are generally very highly thought of) of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colours" trilogy, it will just be said that all three films in the trilogy are must-watches in their own way.

The first film in the trilogy 'Three Colours: Blue' serves as a very poignant exploration of grief and liberty (in the emotional sense), and to me it is one of the most moving and interesting depictions of grief and liberty in film. It is heavily symbolic, with its intricate use of music, the dominant use of the colour blue in the colour palette, its interesting use of fade outs (though actually different to their usual use, representative of time standing still rather than it passing or a scene conclusion), links to the main character's past (here the use of falling) and the bottle recycling, but not in an incoherent sense.

Visually, 'Three Colours: Blue' looks stunning. The whole film is shot with aesthetic grace and elegance and while the use of blue is dominant for symbolic reasons it is never gimmicky or cheap. Kieslowski's direction is thoughtful and never intrusive, and the intricate music score and the symbolic way it's utilised (representing Julie's struggles with isolation) is inspired, "Song for the Unification of Europe" is one of the most emotional tracks of music in any film seen by me recently.

Story-wise, 'Three Colours: Blue' challenges in a way but also always engages, mainly because of how movingly and intensely it deals with the tragic story of Julie and its themes of grief and liberty. The pacing is deliberate but never hits a dull spot.

One of 'Three Colours: Blue' is the astonishing performance from Juliette Binoche, an intensely affecting portrayal that ranks high up with her best performances. All the cast are fine, particularly Benoît Régent and Emmanuelle Riva, but in the acting stakes this is Binoche's film.

All in all, a beautiful, thought-provoking and moving film, and a wonderful start for a very interesting trilogy of films. 10/10 Bethany Cox

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.

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.