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.

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.

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.

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.

The subject(mourn,lost)is so interesting and profound that this film is a real treasure. It is very difficult to write about 'Bleu' because this film has so many intense scenes,with many details.Juliette Binoche's vulnerability is in every scene, every gesture, every moment. She plays an enigmatic woman,'Julie,' we're witness to her terrible loss(her husband who was a famous composer and her daughter died in a car crash)She is the survivor,not only of the accident,but of herself too.The film doesn't show us how her life was before the tragedy,but' Bleu' focuses on her personal journey to healing.

Julie seems stoic,she did not criy hysterically or stay in bed totally depressed,her grief is intimate and touching.In one scene when Julie is near the blue crystal mobile(which belonged to her daughter) just notice her reaction.Another poignant scene is when Julie is in that swimming pool,suddenly,she stops and she can hear her husband's symphony(all in her head).

Bleu also approaches a philosophical question-when you lose everything can you start all over again?,life is a series of events and choices,Julie moves to another place from the country to a city.She did not want to see her friends,she wants to be alone but is this possible?,her past will haunt her.

Another interesting aspect of this film is the use of music instead of dialogue,her silence is a reference of her terrible loss and pain,she is not depressed but sad. Also the meaning of the unfinished symphony of her husband is very profound (is connected with her grief and healing)

The photography of the film and the beautiful and delicate face of Binoche contribute to the impact of BLEU.

Kieslowski was one of the most talented directors, I really admired his 'Trois couleurs' trilogy but I think,'Bleu' was his most powerful film.

10/10