Three Colors: Blue

Three Colors: Blue

French release poster
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
Produced by Marin Karmitz
Written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Agnieszka Holland
Edward Żebrowski
Starring Juliette Binoche
Benoît Régent
Emmanuelle Riva
Florence Pernel
Guillaume De Tonquédec
Music by Zbigniew Preisner
Cinematography Sławomir Idziak
Edited by Jacques Witta
Production
company
Distributed by MK2 Diffusion (France)
Miramax (US)
Release dates
  • 10 January 1993 (1993-01-10) (Warsaw)
  • 8 September 1993 (1993-09-08) (France)
Running time
 94 minutes
Country France
Poland
Switzerland
Language French
Polish
Box office $1,324,974 (US)[1]

Three Colors: Blue (French: Trois couleurs: Bleu) is a 1993 French drama film written, produced, and directed by the acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue is the first of three films that comprise The Three Colors Trilogy, themed on the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it is followed by White and Red. According to Kieślowski, the subject of the film is liberty, specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political meaning.[2]

Set in Paris, the film is about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident. Suddenly set free from her familial bonds, she attempts to cut herself off from everything and live in isolation from her former ties, but finds that she can't free herself from human connections.[3]

Plot

Julie (Juliette Binoche), wife of the famous composer Patrice de Courcy, must cope with the death of her husband and daughter in an automobile accident she herself survives. While recovering in hospital, Julie attempts suicide by overdose, but cannot swallow the pills. After being released from hospital, Julie, who it is suggested wrote (or helped to write) much of her husband's famous pieces, destroys what is left behind of them. Calling Olivier (Benoît Régent), an unmarried collaborator of her husband's who has always admired her, she spends a night with him and says goodbye. Emptying the family house and putting it up for sale, she takes an apartment in Paris without telling anyone, her only memento being a mobile of blue beads that the viewer assumes belonged to her daughter.

Julie disassociates herself from all past memories and distances herself from former friendships, even being no longer recognised by her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. She also reclaims and destroys the unfinished score for her late husband's last commissioned work—a piece celebrating European unity following the end of the Cold War. Snatches of its music, however, haunt her throughout the film.

Despite her desire to live anonymously and alone, life in Paris forces Julie to confront elements of her past that she would rather not face. A boy who saw the accident seeks her out to give her a Christian cross he found by the car and to repeat her husband's last words, the punchline of an indelicate joke. She reluctantly befriends an exotic dancer named Lucille (Charlotte Véry) who is having an affair with one of the neighbors and helps her when she needs moral support. Then on TV she sees Olivier in an interview, announcing that he will try to complete Patrice's commission and showing pictures of Patrice with an attractive young woman.

While trying both to stop Olivier from completing the score and to find out who her husband's mistress was, she becomes more engaged in her former life. She tracks down Sandrine (Florence Pernel), Patrice's lover, and finds out that she is carrying his child; Julie arranges for her to have her husband's house, not yet sold, and recognition of his paternity for the child. This provokes her to restart her relationship with Olivier and to collaborate with him after all.

In the final sequence, part of their completed Unity of Europe piece is played (which features chorus and a solo soprano singing in Greek the praise of divine love in Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians) and images are seen of all the people Julie has affected by her actions. The final image is of Julie, crying—the second time she does so in the film.[4]

Cast

Symbols

Music plays an intricate element of the plot in that it illustrates Julie's efforts to be isolated from everything but cannot do it, such as music cannot be made with a single note but through harmony with all others and how everyone has (or represents) a different kind of music, such as the union of Julie/Patrice had a special tone, which is quite different and more raw with the union of Julie/Olivier.[5][6]

A symbol common to the three films is that of an underlying link or thing that keeps the protagonist linked to their past. In the case of Blue, it is the lamp of blue beads and a symbol seen throughout the film in the TV of people falling (doing either sky diving or bungee jumping), the director is careful in showing falls with no cords at the beginning of the film but as the story develops the image of cords becomes more and more apparent as a symbol of a link to the past. In the case of White the item that links Karol to his past is a 2 Fr. coin and a plaster bust of Marianne[7] that he steals from an antique store in Paris. In the case of Red the judge never closes or locks his doors and his fountain pen, which stops working at a crucial point in the story.[8]

Another recurring image related to the spirit of the film is that of elderly people recycling bottles: In Three Colors: Blue, an old woman in Paris is recycling bottles and Julie does not notice her (in the spirit of freedom), in Three Colors: White, an old man also in Paris is trying to recycle a bottle but cannot reach the container and Karol looks at him with a sinister grin on his face (in the spirit of equality) and in Three Colors: Red an old woman cannot reach the hole of the container and Valentine helps her (in the spirit of fraternity).

Production

Blue was an international co-production between the French companies CED Productions, Eurimages, France 3 Cinéma, and MK2 Productions, the Swiss company CAB Productions and the Polish company Studio Filmowe TOR.

Like the other films in the trilogy, Blue makes frequent visual allusions to its title: numerous scenes are shot with blue filters or blue lighting, and many objects are blue. When Julie thinks about the musical score that she has tried to destroy, blue light overwhelms the screen. The film also includes several references to the colors of the tricolor that inspired Kieślowski's trilogy: several scenes are dominated by red light, and in one scene, children dressed in white bathing suits with red floaters jump into the blue swimming pool. Another scene features a link with the next film in the trilogy: spotting the lawyer Sandrine, her husband's mistress, Julie is seen entering a courtroom where Karol, the Polish main character of White, is being divorced by Dominique, his estranged French wife.

Reception

Three Colors: Blue has received universally positive reviews, 8.5 out of 10 on Tomatometer and 93% audience likes, according to those collated on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator site[9] while Internet Movie Database (IMDB) rates it 8.0 out of 10.[10]

Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle said:[11]

Blue is a film that engages the mind, challenges the senses, implores a resolution, and tells, with aesthetic grace and formal elegance, a good story and a political allegory.

Evangeline Spachis of the GirlonFilm states that:[12]

Blue is a visual and arousing cinematic experience, one that deserves repeated and in-depth viewings.

Derek Malcolm of the Guardian commented on the film as:[13]

Blue remains an intense and moving tribute to the woman at its centre who, in coming back from tragedy, almost refuses, but ultimately accepts the only real love that's on offer.

Soundtrack

Awards

References

  1. ↑ Three Colors: Blue at Box Office Mojo
  2. ↑ Three Colors: Blue, Bonus Features: Commentary by Anne Insdorf, A Look at "Blue".
  3. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. Edited by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 212.
  4. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof, and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Three Colours Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. Translated by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
  5. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. Edited by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 224.
  6. ↑ Insdorf, Annette. Double Lives, Second Chances: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. New York: Hyperion, 1999, p. 140.
  7. ↑ Studies in Eastern European Cinema, volume 2, number 1 (2011-03-01), p. 75
  8. ↑ Leong, Anthony. "Demystifying Three Colors: Blue". Media Circus. Retrieved 30 October 2011.
  9. ↑ "Three Colors: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu) (1993)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-07-11.
  10. ↑ "IMDB rating". IMDB. 2014. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  11. ↑ Baumgarten, Marjorie. "Calendar: Film Listings - Blue", The Austin Chronicle, March 18, 1994. Accessed May 21, 2007.
  12. ↑ "Girl on Film". Girl on Film. 2014. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Derek Malcolm". Derek Malcolm. 14 October 1993. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  14. ↑ "Three Colors Blue (1993)". Swedish Film Institute. 23 March 2014.

External links

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