'Blue,' 'White' and 'Red' represent the apotheosis of European art cinema just at the moment when its very existence seemed most uncertain

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2008)

"Three Colors Blue" is the first part of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy "Blue" is set in France, "White" in Poland and "Red" in Switzerland, but all production was based in France Not only are the colors of the trilogy those of the French national flag; the original intention was meditation on the ideals of the French Revolution: freedom, equality and fraternity This suggests a political dimension to the work But though like most Polish filmmakers Kieslowski had his difficulties with the Polish Communist system, its collapse by the early 1990s meant that he was not only free to work where he pleased, but liberated from the necessity for his films to engage directly in the political process
In "Three Colors Blue" Juliette Binoche plays a woman whose husband and daughter are killed in a car crash Overcome by melancholy, she progressively withdraws from life, depriving herself of possessions and refusing relationships, a state of mind conveyed in part by the director's subtle use of color blue But eventually she is able to accept the attentions of a lover and even to offer friendship to another woman who is pregnant with her husband's child Finally, she completes the piece of music which her husband has been commissioned to write
The result is a work that has less in common with the Polish 'Cinema of moral concern' of the late 1970s than with the tradition of the mainstream European art cinema, in its concerns with alienation and the loss of feeling, countered by the transcendent power of love