The Greatest Of These

Rating: 10/10 (27 November 2019)

There's a car crash and a great composer and his daughter are killed. His wife, Juliet Binoche survives.... sort of. She tries to kill herself, but cannot, so she .... puts everything in trust for her mother and her husband's servants, orders the house sold and the proceeds added to the trust, has one night of passion with her husband's colleague, Benoît Régent, then leaves. She rents a cheap apartment, spends her time watching other people, and drifts.
She tries to disappear into nothingness. However the world keeps intruding.
Since this is the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski's TROIS COULEURS trilogy, I kept looking at the colors. He's obvious in his palette, using blue for sadness, red for life, and a general sepia wash for the anomie and observational phase of the movie.
Yet to reduce a discussion of this fine movie to the technical tricks of the trade does no justice to its rich story, and the way everything in the world comes together to bring Miss Binoche to a realization of her own place in the world and her own nature. There are some startling realizations along the way, and Kieslowski and Miss Binoche are patient and deliberate in this portrait, teasing the audience into being interested in this character, who seems to be nothing without her husband and child, and desires to be nothing. In the end, I like to think, like Kieslowski and Binoche's Julie, we are all more than we seem.