The Blue Room

This is really quite a simple story. Man has affair with other man's wife. Has wife and family but re-unites with woman he met before his marriage. They have a series of trysts. She has a husband who has a serious medical condition and one day he dies. Unfortunately, the woman is a pharmacist and it appears that they have done a "Postman Always Rings Twice" murder. The whole thing focuses on a bewildered man who realizes that his actions have a consequence. He's not even sure what has happened as he sits in a courtroom. Sometimes justice is less about criminal justice and more about moral justice. A slow moving psychological drama based on a George Simenon novel.

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.

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.

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.

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.