"It's only after we've lost everything that we're (almost) free to do anything."

Rating: 9/10 (22 March 2019)

Freedom is a beautiful word but "Blue" deals with the kind of freedom we'd rather not confront once, the one born from the rejection of all achievements, possessions and items of meaningfulness that defined our life... after a tragedy struck.
Julie loses her husband and daughter in a car accident. She tries to commit suicide but living is too strong a call to be ignored, she spits out the tablets and apologizes to the nurse for breaking a glass. Later, she sells her property, gets rid of her fortune and starts a new life with what's at hands: anything but the past that would drown her in an ocean of melancholy. The only concession to the past is that Julie knows she'll never be happy.
And so she moves to some random apartment in Paris and has an affair with the man she knew was in love with her. This is the freedom she doesn't enjoy as much as she undergoes it in a sort of survival and cathartic move. Whether it's truly freedom is left to debate, but we're never left with the feeling that Julie is seeking joy, maybe contentment, acceptance and pinches of satisfaction here and there. So life goes on and appease wounds but allows a few corridors to the past, weakening that fragile 'rebirth' edifice.
And I guess the appeal of "Blue" relies on that very fragility, one that only Juliette Binoche, one of the sweetest and most delicate faces of French cinema could portray. Binoche is so great an actress that even her expressionless moments deliver the right amount of emotionality. She never looks totally happy, nor totally sad, but always at the verge of two totally opposite emotional directions, whatever they are. She's walking on a tightrope with the past acting like gravity and the wind of present blowing, she can only move forward, never look down, any step back and it's the big plunge.
This is not a character but a feeling's study, a remarkable exploration of the complexity of a brave soul from Krzysztof Kieslowski. The late Polish director uses many shots that emphasize Julie's perspective: a close up on a sugar cube absorbing the coffee, a fight seen from her balcony, a street flutist, an old lady with a stooped posture, a family of mice found in the new house. Like the sugar cube, Julie absorbs all these encounters as micro-experiences and then drops everything, never letting any encounter rooting in her life, she finds comfort in the vacuum of the present.
It's easy to regard "Blue", the first opus of the famous "Three Colors" trilogy as an auteur film without a tangible plot but with an introspective look on life. The film might strike as too slow, too contemplative, too bizarre in its editing but it could only work as long as Binoche was consistent with her character... and she always was, as a woman who, unlike Blanche Dubois, depends on the comprehension of strangers. Life has been so unkind to her she can deal without kindness and this is why she has no scruples throwing her husband's last opera partition (composed for some European Union ceremony) in a waste truck. But maybe Art is too great a thing not to survive and Kieslowski the storyteller can't side anymore with his muse and allow the music to resurface in the story.
In the end, it's up to Julie to accept that she can't pretend her past doesn't exist because her husband affected so many lives and those lives still depend on him. There's an arc in Julie's journey in the way she cancels out a few clauses of her existential pact after realizing the way her selfishness deprived people from something that meant a lot in their own lives. The director is too passionate an artist to have a great piece of music being sacrificed, even in a fiction, and there might be a symbolic parallel between the posthumous oeuvre and one baby leaving in the womb of a mistress. Life like the show must go on... and perhaps the greatest triumph of Julie would be to face the present without pretending the past doesn't exist.
I think it's a film about grief more than any exhilaration of freedom. The photography is always intimate even in the external shots, served by a beautiful cinematography, exploring any possibility to paint the screen in a shade of blue (a swimming pool, emerald stones, a blue room). But beyond all these photographic tricks and this is coming from someone whose favorite color happens to be blue, the story was so absorbing that I could find a whole world in Binoche's blue performance. Whether it was intentional that the "Blue" opus would be that sad I don't know but it's a film that I won't forget any soon... not on a personal level. As a father, I can't imagine how unbearable life would be if something ever happened to my daughter. I don't know if I'd be as tough as Julie, but I guess I would try to find a way.
It's a cathartic experience indeed, difficult and serious but short enough to sustain that heaviness in gravity. I won't forget that shot where Julie is in fetal position in the swimming pool, she doesn't sink, doesn't float, doesn't swim, she resists like a baby in the mother's womb... waiting for the miraculous rebirth, as a woman without a past. At the end she's a woman with a past and a future, reconciled with time and able to let a timid smile slip from her face. Just because tears are flowing all over your eyes doesn't mean life isn't worth a little smile, after all.
There's probably a lot to say about "Blue" but let's just see what's behind "White" now, the story about equality... though I suspect it will rise above these values' gimmick and be another powerful statement about something about life. We'll see...