Poetic cinema at its finest.

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2009)

Shot in France with a French cast and a Franco-Polish crew, "Blue" (1993) is the first entry in the masterful Three Colors Trilogy that Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski completed shortly before his untimely death in 1996. Each of the three films draws its title from one of the colors of the French flag. In "Blue" Kieslowski richly counterpoints the color's conventional connotation of grief with its emblematic meaning of "liberty."
After a devastating car accident claims the lives of her young daughter and her internationally renowned composer husband, the film's protagonist Julie (Juliette Binoche) finds herself unable either to deal with the profound pain of loss or, despite several aborted attempts, to commit suicide. She elects instead to distort the meaning of "liberty" by cutting herself off from all things connected to her happy domestic past and from all human relationships that might cause further pain. She empties her home of furnishings - including all but one key item that belonged to her daughter. She retrieves the last composition that her husband was working on (significantly entitled "Concerto for European Unification") and deposits it in a passing garbage truck. She summons and sleeps with her husband's associate, Olivier, who she correctly suspects has always carried a torch of unrequited love.
As a test of her dispassion, Julie perversely uses the act of love making as one final gesture of disconnection, hoping also to prove "just a woman" to Olivier and not worthy of his continued pursuit and idealization. In the morning she deserts Olivier and her emptied country home for a leased room in Paris, where she plans to do nothing and live anonymously. On her way off the estate, however, we watch as Julie scrapes her knuckles along a stone wall until they bleed, suggesting that the pain of human existence and memory resides powerfully beneath her liberated surface.
For some time while residing in Paris, Julie continues her self-imposed human exile, having little to do with her neighbors, focusing intently on the phenomena of the present (like a sugar cube dissolving in her morning coffee), and continuing to repress the feelings and memories symbolized by sudden bursts of orchestral music against a black screen. Inevitably, however, Julie's walled in isolation begins to crumble. Olivier finds her hiding place, a homeless man inexplicably plays fragments of the Unity Concerto on his flute, a young stripper who has been ostracized by all others in Julie's apartment building insinuates herself into Julie's life and re-awakens her memories by zeroing in on the blue glass mobile that hangs in Julie's apartment  the one object connected to her daughter that Julie was unable to abandon or destroy.
Ultimately, two events combine to extract Julie from her psychological slough of despond and initiate the process of her re-engagement with the world. First, by a chance occasion paralleling the accident itself, she learns that her husband had been conducting a prolonged affair with a young law clerk and that the woman is carrying her husband's child. Initially stunned with betrayal, Julie angrily confronts the woman, but then her inherently generous nature surfaces and Julie invites her to take possession of the abandoned country estate. At about the same time, Julie learns that Olivier has undertaken to complete the Unification Concerto on his own, which - as he has counted on - arouses Julie's ire and provokes her into aiding Olivier with the project.
As earlier intimated, it now becomes clear that she, not her husband, was the concerto's primary composer. Work on the concerto not only restores Julie's creative link to life but also sparks love and desire for the ever-faithful Olivier. The healing powers of love and music together are indicated by the lyrics of the concerto's chorus. Adapted from St. Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, they read: "Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, if I have not love, I am nothing." The film ends with a montage of images that weave an existential tapestry of chance and fate, love and isolation, life and death. The most memorable of these is a sonogram of the fetus pulsating in the mistress's womb, compensating imperfectly yet affirmatively for the loss of Julie's own child.
Roger Ebert, in his original review of "Blue," cited Ingmar Bergman's conviction that "many moments in films can only be dealt with by a close-up of a face - the right face - and that too many directors try instead to use dialogue or action." Dialog and action in "Blue" are indeed sparse and obviously subordinated not only to close-ups on Juliette Binoche's extraordinarily expressive face, but to other purely cinematic film elements such as color, composition, camera placement, and  perhaps above all  sound. Indeed, "Blue" includes one of the most original and emotionally powerful diegetic soundtracks that I have ever encountered.
Whether regarded as an independent entity or viewed in the context of the whole trilogy, "Blue" is a major work by one of the great masters of contemporary world cinema.