Three Colors: Blue

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993) is one of the three immaculate films that came out of 1993, along with Jane Campion’s The Piano. Moreover, though, Kieslowski’s film, along with the remaining top ten on my list, is one of those films that are perfectly attuned to a visual as well as aural rhetoric, celebrating every bit of minute composition. A composite of the three colors of the French flag, this first piece of the trilogy focuses on freedom apart from historical memory, with the widowed Julie (Juliette Binoche) struggling to lead a new life liberated from all threads of connection. Yet the philosophical implications that Kieslowski and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz question are whether or not such a life segregated from all social and psychological contact is deserving of high praise or melancholic regret.

After the car accident that claims her composer husband and young daughter, we see Julie try to commit suicide by swallowing pills in a recovery hospital. But she cannot give in to desires to end it all, at least not physically. Psychologically, though, her seclusion away from all former employees and acquaintances signals how that she cannot yet confront her pain. She destroys what she believes to be her (or is it her husband’s—an ambiguity that rightly affords Julie more dimension) sole copy of a commissioned symphony for the Unification of Europe, epitomizing the metaphoric destruction of unity. Instead, she remains adrift, visiting her institutionalized mother, a sufferer of Alzheimer’s, who is the personification of total freedom away from historical memory or connection.

These visits to her mother plague Julie’s perfect exterior of wishing this life for herself. Significantly, whereas she has habitual visits to a pool and swims in the waters, her mother spends her days watching the television as individuals bungee-jump toward the water below, though they are unable to penetrate the ambiguous form of baptism that Julie is unconsciously enacting with her laps in the pool. As such, the water becomes one of the many transformative healers in the film, and it’s no surprise that the final scene at the pool has the water, Julie’s haven, invaded by many youths. It has achieved its ambiguous aim and now reminds Julie of the world outside her small seclusion.

Over time, she comes to rely on her pleasant rendezvous with Olivier Benoit (Benoît Régent), a former benefactor of her husband and a man who urges her to finish the symphony. As she begins work (anew?) on the piece, the frequent fade-to-black intercuts of music and their symbolic indecision fade away, giving way to a new authority and open, structured self. The film closes by connecting the many disparate people that we have seen in what appears to be a single, unbroken tracking shot, antipicating the themes of fraternity that would later follow in Red.

The idea of returning to society despite heartache, together with the visual patterns that frequent the film, make Blue an exemplary film for trauma and recovery, and, moreover, position Kieslowski as one of the most literate and humane of directors.

Three Colors: Blue 9/10