Blue
by Krzysztof Kieslowski
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Actor: Benoît Régent, Florence Pernel, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew ZamachowskiDirector: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Cinematographer: Lechoslaw Trzesowski
Writer: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Producer: Marin Karmitz
Writer: Agnieszka Holland
Writer: Edward Zebrowski
Writer: Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Writer: Slawomir Idziak
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-03-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Miramax
DVD Reviews of Blue
DVD Review: Glamorous suffering.
Summary: 1 Stars
Julie (Juliette Binoche) has just lost her husband and her little daughter in a car accident. She is emotionally shattered and withdraws into herself. Soon, we see her walking through her husband's mansion (he was a famous composer, and thus a wealthy man) and arranging to sell it. We see her sorrowful face in close-up. Several times she looks like she's about to cry. Then she steps outside, the camera zooms out, and we see that she is wearing stylish shoes with very high heels. In fact, her whole attire is very glamorous and fashionable.
That's what Julie's suffering is like: glamorous and fashionable, for the entire duration of the film. Kieslowski is serious about Julie's emotions, he wants her sorrow to move the audience. But nonetheless that stylized glamour suffuses every single scene. Every day, Julie goes out and broods by herself, not just anywhere, but in a fashionable cafe, over coffee and ice cream, served in elegant glassware.
She moves out of the mansion to an apartment in the city. Kieslowski means to suggest that this apartment is old and run-down, because the landlord says that it needs maintenance. But in the ensuing scenes, it looks stylish and expensive, full of tasteful furniture. Sometimes Julie chills out here in a chair. She stares ahead in mournful silence, but she doesn't forget to wear a chic sweater. Her apartment looks huge, by the way. If only I could find one of comparable size.
At night, Julie goes swimming. She can't sleep from suffering too much, so she goes to a vast, gorgeous crystal blue pool and swims back and forth. In the daytime, sometimes she quietly suffers on a bench outside. One time, an old woman shuffles by and tries to deposit an empty bottle in a recycling bin. But because she's bent double from old age, she can't reach the opening to put the bottle inside. Julie observes this, closes her eyes, and basks in the sunlight. Heaven forfend that other people's suffering should distract her from her own.
In another scene, some guy calls her and claims to have some "important business." Julie tersely answers, "Nothing's important," thus expressing her sadness and alienation. As she holds the receiver with that mournful look on her face, we admire her trendy, fashionable androgynous hairstyle.
Then, she suddenly finds that a mouse has made a nest in her closet. Julie sees that the mouse has babies, and feels sympathy. She broods over this matter for some time, then kills the mice anyway. But afterwards she feels really guilty, and even cries. A normal person would either kill the mice, or feel sorry for them and leave them alone, or kill them first and later come to regret it. But not our tortured heroine. She feels sorry for them first, but she has to kill them, just so she can feel and confess gnawing remorse.
Needless to say, Julie has no job (a fact she proudly flaunts before the landlord), but of course it turns out that she's a brilliant musician, capable of easily finishing her husband's incomplete concerto. Her husband, by the way, was not just any old composer. He was working on a special concerto in honour of the unification of Europe. This work was supposed to be played in all the European capitals on the day of unification.
This deliberately symbolic detail is the key to the film. Kieslowski loves Julie's elegance and wealth. He may not even want to emphasize it, but he can't help it, it's everywhere. And that's why the music is about, not just any old thing, but the unification of Europe. This is what unification means to Kieslowski -- a magical transformation after which everyone will become rich, dress fashionably and sit in expensive cafes, full of elegant and aesthetic melancholy. He desperately craves this wealthy elegance, and he wants us to admire it as well.
Every aspect of the film is subordinate to this vision. The dialogue, for instance, is very heavily stylized. The characters don't talk, they make exhibitionistic declarative statements. Julie meets her husband's mistress, who is also elegant and beautiful. The following exchange takes place: "Excuse me." "Yes." "You were my husband's mistress." "Yes." Instantly they know each other, instantly they understand and soon they reconcile. I found myself thinking of Bergman's later films, where routine and convention make it impossible for characters to express themselves in such a straightforward manner, and anyone who tries finds the attempt very painful. But in Kieslowski's vision, the unification of Europe instantly removes such barriers along with all other problems.
Juliette Binoche came to "Blue" not long after finishing "Lovers On The Bridge" with Leos Carax. In fact, Carax is also fond of stylized, glamorous romanticism, but his version of it is heedless and irrational, and frequently opposed to fashion and wealth. In his film "Bad Blood," he occasionally cuts to a black screen for a moment, and then cuts back to the scene. Kieslowski plunders Carax's technique as well as his actress, but in his hands, the same technique is used as an overt signal to the audience that something important is happening. Where Carax's cuts last only a second, and occur more or less randomly in his film, Kieslowski makes them last longer, and adds sudden bursts of majestic violins, the better to illustrate that the moment is weighty with emotional significance. Unsurprisingly, Carax is widely viewed as a failure, and Kieslowski is lauded as a genius.
"Blue" combines elegant coldness and cheap sentimentality, both meant to induce narcissistic self-pity. First Julie throws away a copy of her late husband's unfinished masterwork, then she finds another copy and finishes it. There's no real difference between these two acts -- both serve to assert Julie's great importance. And underwriting the film's self-obsessed heroine is the director's passionate love for those elegant, beautiful, callous people who will inherit the world after unification.
Description of Blue
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