Three Colours: Blue
Trois couleurs: Bleu, Trzy kolory: Niebieski
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993)
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s trilogy has been newly restored for its thirtieth birthday – a good opportunity to catch up with this famous work, none of which I’ve seen before. I’d never even realised that Polish auteur Kieślowski’s tricolour concept related to the French flag and national motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité. According to this scheme, the theme of Blue, the first part of the trilogy, is freedom. A few minutes into the narrative, a car crashes into a tree. Three people – a married couple and their only child – are in the car and two are killed in the accident (which is staged very credibly and shockingly). The remainder of the film describes the aftermath for the survivor, Julie (Juliette Binoche). On the one hand, the implication that a woman losing her husband and five-year-old daughter in such circumstances thereby is freed – or at least sees a chance to explore new possibilities for freedom – is striking, even subversive. On the other, you wouldn’t actually guess from seeing Blue, as distinct from reading about it and its two companion pieces, that Kieślowski was primarily concerned with the first watchword of the French Revolution.
In hospital after the accident, Julie feels compelled to choose what could be considered the ultimate freedom: she steals a bottle of tablets from the dispensary with the intention of ending her life but she can’t swallow them. Her husband was the famous composer Patrice de Courcy (Hugues Quester); when Julie returns to their home, she destroys the unfinished score for his last commission, a piece to celebrate European unity at the end of the Cold War. She contacts Patrice’s sometime collaborator, Olivier (Benoît Régent); aware that he carries a torch for her, Julie sleeps with Olivier before telling him they won’t meet again. She empties the family house, puts it on the market and moves to an apartment in Paris. The sole memento from her previous life that she retains there is a mobile of blue beads that belonged to her late daughter, Anne (I can’t identify the child who plays her: the character isn’t shown in the IMDb cast list). At one point, Julie removes one of the beads and appears to do with it what she couldn’t do with the tablets in hospital – bite, crunch, swallow.
‘I want no possessions,’ says Julie, ‘no memories, no friends, no lovers – they’re all traps’. Kieślowski, who wrote the screenplay with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, presents Julie’s sloughing off of her former life as surprisingly easy in practical terms, given Patrice’s celebrity and Julie’s own reputation as more than an assistant to her famous husband. There are many mourners at Patrice and Anne’s funeral, which Julie doesn’t attend but watches on what seems to be a live video link. A journalist (Hélène Vincent) subsequently asks her,‘Is it true you wrote your husband’s music?’ (without getting an answer). Bar Olivier, though, Julie has next to no social contacts to renounce – and no relatives except for her mother (Emmanuelle Riva), whom she visits a couple of times in a care home. The mother has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recognise her daughter, which makes Julie’s mission to erase the past all the more straightforward. Julie goes several times to public swimming baths where, more often than not, she’s the only swimmer. The place seems to be open all hours, so that Kieślowski and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, can make the blue water even more eye-catching under night lights.
Blue‘s sustained visual allure is absorbing but also distancing. With Juliette Binoche’s face as its centre and in frequent close-up, the film is bound to look lovely. Although Julie’s Paris apartment is sparsely furnished and decorated, the minimalist décor comes across as an affluent middle-class style statement as much as a declaration of intent: it aligns with Binoche’s unadorned beauty, which the heroine’s simple hairstyle and wardrobe make all the more salient, as much as with Julie’s state of mind. As her mother, the perennially elegant Emmanuelle Riva suffers from a notably decorous, even soigné, form of dementia. A less typical, more memorable image – whether staged or an actual event caught on camera I don’t know – is supplied by a different elderly woman, watched by Julie from behind her apartment window, in the street outside. The woman tries to put a glass bottle in a bottle bank. Her face unseen, her back bent by what’s presumably osteoporosis, she reaches up with difficulty to insert the bottle, which is still lodged only precariously by the time Kieślowski moves on. In the course of the bottle bank sequence, he cuts away two or three times to Julie’s observation of the scene – underlining emphatically in whom he’s interested and keeping the viewer, like Julie, at a remove from the old woman.
It’s not long before Julie discovers, of course, that she can neither completely abandon her past nor detach herself in the present. Snatches of Patrice’s music haunt her. Antoine (Yann Trégouët), the teenage boy who was the only witness to the car accident, phones and then meets with her to return a necklace that he found at the crash scene, although Julie insists he keep it. Olivier tracks her down. (I didn’t understand how it was that Antoine managed to contact her more easily than it seems Olivier did.) She’s visited by a fellow occupant of her apartment building who is organising a petition to the landlord to demand the eviction of another tenant, Lucille (Charlotte Véry), an exotic dancer at a nearby club. Julie refuses to sign and soon strikes up a tentative friendship with Lucille. Julie returns one day to discover a rat, with her newborns, in the apartment, and is scared stiff; she initiates contact with another neighbour, asking to borrow his cat to get rid of her unwelcome guests. (I didn’t understand either why Julie kept calling the rats mice.)
Some of these incursions on Julie’s anonymity – the disgusted neighbour’s petition, the rodent problem – are plausible through seeming random but in the closing stages of Blue Kieślowski relies on conventional, not to say clichéd, happenings to complicate her determined isolation. Julie happens to see Olivier on television: he’s giving an interview in which he reveals that he kept a copy of Patrice’s work on the European unity piece and plans to complete it himself. In the course of the interview, a photograph flashes up on screen of Patrice with another woman. Through Olivier, Julie discovers she is Sandrine (Florence Pernel), who was not only in a years-long relationship with Patrice but is now pregnant by him. From this point on, Blue relies on its impeccable art-film surface and cultural class to disguise a lapse into soap opera. A super-civilised confrontation with Patrice’s mistress ends with Julie’s giving away the former family home (still unsold) to Sandrine because she carries within her the future that Julie doesn’t have. (Sandrine, a high-flying Paris lawyer, is hardly in need of such generosity: I found myself wishing Patrice had been having it off instead with a more economically deserving cause, like the exotic dancer.) Julie also decides to collaborate on the unfinished musical piece with Olivier, who then refuses to acknowledge the work as his unless Julie shares the composing credit, which she agrees to do. She asks him if he still loves her and the answer is yes. They meet again. Perhaps Julie does have a future after all.
You might think Patrice de Courcy’s commission was surplus to requirements thanks to Beethoven and Schiller but Kieślowski and his composer, Zbigniew Preisner, are resourceful. Preisner’s composition on behalf of Patrice-Julie-Olivier is flamboyant verging on bombastic. In the closing sequence, the music is premiered, complete with choir and soprano solo: the lyrics are supplied by St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The piece plays against a montage of shots of key characters from the story. The film ends with Julie’s tear-stained face gradually beginning to smile. Juliette Binoche is asked to make that kind of transition a lot. She delivers luminously but I found Blue unmoving: this conception-driven account of loss conveys little sense of a real struggle to cope with and come through bereavement. At the start, before the car crash, Julie’s daughter is shown on camera to the virtual exclusion of Patrice; in what follows, Anne barely gets mentioned. I felt this was less a matter of words failing grief-stricken Julie than of Kieślowski’s failing to work out a way of dramatising the mother’s loss of her child. The husband is a better bet, what with his music and his infidelity. Julie’s discovery of the latter is a coup de foudre. If Patrice was in the public eye (and snaps of him and Sandrine together are part of a TV channel’s photograph library), it’s unclear how Julie could have remained in the dark about the affair. But finding out about it so belatedly gives her another reason now to jettison the past and, I suppose, to feel ‘free’.
9 April 2023