Music, Family and Death

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2013)

Kieslowski's "Trois couleurs: Bleu" (1993) has been among my favourite films for as long as I can remember, yet it manages to surprise me with each viewing: it's so perfectly nuanced, emotionally heartbreaking and demanding, visually coherent and ipso fact perfect elaboration of film as art and art as something of value. The rest of the trilogy is just as mind-boggling in its brilliance, tenderly radical in its visual determination. But this! Nonpareil filmmaking only equaled in the past 20 years by Wong, Malick, Tarr and the Brothers Quay.
Kieslowski sees beautifully: organically, rooted in true presence of not only the characters but us; us not only as observers but as participants. He does not only show but truly takes us there, not only refers to emotion but charges each image and sound abundantly with that which we may recognize in ourselves. Reciprocally, not patronizingly, so effortlessly.
The smallest of objects become amplified in their significance, and this way Kieslowski and Tarkovsky are alike: the objects are given life much richer than what they usually are as simple décor. They are given memories and this makes them alive for us, since we can see them interface with the people inhabiting this lonely space.
This film in particular speaks to me with such force because three things in particular it shares with me that I can share with it: music, family and death. All this in a work of art that exhibits powerful visual ingenuity and radical rethinking of the use of sound and image.