Trois Coleurs - Bleu : Un (faux) Revue

This movie came as a relief to me after several weeks of cinematic stagnation, when I almost felt like I had lost the capacity to appreciate good cinema. I argued with a couple of cinephile friends , rather snobbishly in hindsight, about how books were a qualitatively superior media to film, how it let the reader form his own imagery and work with her own imagination. Suddenly however I find all that visual pleasure of art in motion reawakened in me : thanks to the first of Krystoff Kieslowski's celebrated French trilogy, which I decided to watch again today after maybe five odd years. So I might as well dedicate a blog entry to it. This is not a review : since I don't critically analyze anything, and I haven't watched any scene more than once. This is more of an impressionistic account of some random little things about "Bleu" that pleased me so much.

The plotline is fairly simple. It's about a famous French composer's wife ('Julie' played by the amazing Juliette Binochet) who loses her husband and child in a road accident, and decides to withdraw completely into herself. But she soon finds it's not going to be as easy as she'd imagined, to cut herself totally off from others , not least because the music establishment is hounding her for information on an unfinished masterpiece of her husband's. An odd assortment of characters : a disturbed lover, a prostitute who befriends her, a geriatric mother, an adolescent boy who witnessed the accident, her husband's mistress (of whom she learns only after his death) and possibly also his music, all flit into and out of her life, often forcing her to relate to them emotionally.

The most remarkable quality of the movie is its colorful and richly textured cinematography. Often the visual sequences are crafted around masterful stills, mostly beautiful close-ups of objects. In these stunningly beautiful passages, the art of film making is almost reduced to the stringing together of artistic still photos. There's this particular scene where a sugar cube is dipped into a cup of coffee, camera trained to macro, and we see the brown liquid gradually diffuse into the whiteness of the cube : perhaps like the protagonist being unable to resist outside influences very naturally seeping into her life (if I were forced to seek metaphor). The preoccupation with objects and colors keeps the viewers intrigued while offering us glimpses into Julie's state of mind. The blue chandelier in her apartment is the motif of the film , quite possibly standing for hope and redemption. It evokes childhood memories in the hardboiled prostitute who claims to do what she does for "fun". Numerous such moments of photographic brilliance stand out : the low shot from a strange angle of the car's tyres before the accident, the smooth motion of the camera over music notations as each symbol comes into focus alternately (when that particular note of music sounds in the background), and the closeups of Binochet are random examples that come to mind.

The style of storytelling is simple but interesting. It always revolves around Julie, but is an almost disconnected series of her encounters with the different characters who she wishes to shake off but can't, while finally realizing their worth to her. Binochet's acting is par excellence. She exudes a certain stonelike quality of stoicism that plays against the natural sensitivity of her delicately beautiful face. She appears callously cruel when she tries to take her own life, destroys some of her husband's unfinished compositions, sets a cat on some mice (with a newborn litter), invites her lover (a friend of her dead husband's who she knew to have always been in love with her) to bed only to walk out on him in the morning with "I slept with you so suddenly only to have you realize that I'm like any other woman", while the vulnerability and human sensitivities show up when she tries to contend with her husband's music , or come to terms with his pregnant mistress, or feels violent remorse for some of her cold-hearted actions. A standout recurrent imagery is Julie swimming alone in a pool at night, something she seems to do frequently, perhaps as a sort of purging exercise? The irony of her body making it with gracefully athletic ease through the water while her mind is tormented with doubt and survivor's guilt is palpable. Two key plot elements also made their impression on me : Julie's realization through her lover, her prostitute friend and her ailing demented mother that there are people who depend on her emotionally, however emotionally non-committal she might try to be, and her being continually haunted by her husband's music and her own obvious past love of it : even a streetside tramp she takes pity on plays on his flute to remind her of it.

I have often felt guilty about watching a film as if I were reading a book, concentrating more on the sequential narrative rather than the visual one. The essential story and how the characters act and relate to each other and also the dialogue often take precedence with me over camera angles and scene compositions. This was one of the few movies I could appreciate at all levels. The music too is a treat as is to be expected from a film that deals with western classical music.

One final word about the literary aspect. Julie is probably the first female protagonist I was able to identify with. Similar existential treatments of alienated women are to be found in Bergman's "Persona" or "Silence", but they're much darker and arguably psychologically more complex. Kieslowski on the other hand offers color and redemption, and in the end liberty is not from life and society as Julie might have envisioned, but from the chains of her own angst. While a Sartre might have dealt with the nausea evoked by obsession with objects, Kieslowski delights us with their visual beauty.

N.B : "Three Colours (Polish: Trzy kolory) is the collective title of three films — a trilogy — directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, two made in French and one primarily in Polish: Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue) (1993), Trzy kolory: Biały (Three Colours: White) (in French: Blanc) (1994), and Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red) (1994).Blue, white, and red are the colours of the French flag in left-to-right order, and the story of each film is loosely based on one of the three political ideals in the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality, fraternity" - Wikipedia.

Here's the imdb link for the movie.

Apologies for not spelling Krystoff the polished way :P

ps : Watched "White" today (a week later), and felt it was a waste of my time. :(