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Juliette Binoche seeks liberty from grief in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterpiece Three Colours: Blue |
Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Cast: Juliette Binoche (Julie de Courcy/Vignon), Benoît
Régent (Olivier Benôit), Emmanuelle Riva (Madame Vignon), Florence Pernel
(Sandrine), Guillaume de Tonquédec (Serge), Charlotte Véry (Lucille), Yann
Trégouët (Antoine), Hélène Vincent (La journaliste), Zbigniew Zamachowski
(Karol Karol), Julie Delpy (Dominique)
There are few foreign language films that have cemented
themselves in film’s cultural history more than Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. These three
inter-linked films – made with French and Polish money – looked (individually)
at themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, while using a colour palate and
design that reflected one colour of the French flag each. The first film in
this interlinking trilogy is Blue, a sombre,
intriguing, intimate drama that perhaps wears its intelligence a little heavily
on its sleeve.
Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche) is the only survivor of a
car crash that kills her husband, a famous composer, and her daughter. Lost in
grief, Julie decides that she will separate herself from the world and live
entirely independently. She rents out her home, distances herself from friends,
takes back her maiden name and destroys what she believes to be the only copy
of her husband’s final composition – a concert for the unification of Europe.
But Julie finds that liberating herself from all worldly connections is not as
easy as she hoped.
Blue is a
heartfelt, gentle film that throbs with emotional intensity, much of it coming
from Binoche’s searing performance of a woman consumed with a mixture of grief
and survivor guilt, who sees complete isolation and “liberty” from all
connections as the only chance for sanity. Kieślowski’s direction is masterful
– patient, stable, quiet and with a brilliant eye for small details. The film
is crammed with small moments that speak of peace and quiet reflection – from watching
a lump of sugar being soaked in tea, to lingering studies of everything from
rooms to streets.
The opening sequences of the film convey this masterful
confidence from Kieślowski. The camera is a still observer, alternating between
subtle POV shots and gentle, perfectly placed observation of Julie. Every
moment of the shocking discovery of Julie’s loss is wonderfully assembled –
from the stumbling news from the doctor, to the crackling mini-TV on which she
watches her family’s funeral being broadcast. Quietly we see Julie return to
her own home – and Binoche bottles up emotion with a resolve that suggests as
much her determination not to engage with the pain as it does self-control. No
wonder her housekeeper bursts into tears at the fact that Julie isn’t crying.
This all ties in very interestingly with the film’s theme of
liberty. Conventionally, we would have had Julie escaping from something to
find her own life. Kieślowski’s film more interestingly explores the positive
and negative of liberty. Julie chooses freedom from all of life’s connections –
but this is shown constantly to be not only impossible, but also less than
healthy. Her surface liberty is instead crushing her under the pressure of
isolation.
At the same time, the film is partly about Julie learning to
free herself from her survivor guilt. Cutting herself off from the world denies
her a genuine emotional connection with her husband’s friend Olivier (a puppy
doggish Benoît Régent). In the first months of her guilt she sleeps with Olivier,
hoping it will get her a bit of peace (it doesn’t). Inevitably, as Julie finds
out more about her husband’s life – and as we find out that his music output
was heavily reliant on Julie’s secret collaboration – the film becomes a
question of whether Julie will allow herself the liberty from her past to
continue living.
Because in a way this is an anti-tragedy: it starts with a
trauma and is about the survivor learning to continue her life. Kieślowski
peppers the film with moments of falling, from items to bungee jumpers on the
TV. Slowly, these images of falling progress to include being caught, or shots
of the bungee cords snapping the person back from oblivion. It’s a neat, subtle
continual reference to Julie’s unconscious search for support.
Particularly as it’s made clear that Julie’s entire
personality is all about giving, about loving and supporting people. From her
silent collaboration with her husband, to her patient caring for her mother
suffering from increasing dementia (another perverse form of liberty), to her
forming a reluctant friendship with an exotic dancer in her block of flats (who
the rest of the tenants are trying to drive out), it’s clear that Julie’s
attempt to distance herself is never going to truly work. A character late on
even tells her that her husband had always described her as kind and forgiving
– qualities Julie learns to re-embrace.
The wider world that Julie is trying to escape is
represented brilliantly throughout by the score of her husband’s (her?) music
for Europe. This score – a richly exuberant piece of music by Zbigniew Priesner
– constantly intrudes into the action, accompanied by moments where Kieślowski
seems to suggest time has stopped as Julie becomes lost in her reflections. Kieślowski
uses colour changes and slow zooms to suggest throughout these beats where
Julie temporarily becomes lost in the past and memories. The continual presence
of the music is perfectly done.
The one element I was less keen on was the over use of blue.
From filters on the camera, to backlighting, to objects present in every frame,
there is a lot of blue in this movie – every shot has something blue in it.
Although this is clever, and clearly thematically intentional for the whole
trilogy – I’ve got to be honest spotting this stuff probably took me out of the
film at moments. I imagine on a second viewing this will be dramatically
reduced – but it’s one of those curses of a trilogy of films that have been so
hyped up on the arts circuit, that you are aware of some of its subtle tricks
so much that they cease to be subtle.
But Three Colours:
Blue is still a masterful, quiet study of grief, loss and yearning, that
avoids the obvious and explores different types of liberty and freedom. Binoche
is brilliant in the lead role, and Kieślowski sears the brains with images (I
still wince remembering a sequence where Julie deliberately scrapes her
knuckles over a wall she walks past) and his direction is impeccably sensitive
and unshowy, letting the film speak for itself. I can’t wait to watch the other
two films in the trilogy – and see how this might affect my views on this first
one.
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