A sad portrait of pain and grief

Rating: Null/10 (10 March 2011)

I never go to the movie to see myself on screen. The movies, for me, are a tapestry of lives and actions that are foreign to my little world. Movies can be a window to lifestyle I will never experience and people that I will never meet. I have noticed that some people tend to form an opinion about a film based on the character's actions by comparison with their own. I prefer characters that deal with things in different ways. Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue features just such a person.
Her name is Julie (Juliet Binoche) and she lives in Paris with her husband and their daughter. Her family dies in an accident, leaving her in an emotional stalemate. The spaces of her life that were once populated by the vibrancy and energy of a busy life are now still and quiet. Long days of emptiness stretch on and on. What we come to expect from our usual patterns of this situation is that Julie will, with time, attempt to find a way to press on. Somewhere, we expect, she will end her loneliness and despair by starting over. This is not Julie's way. Thrust into this horrible situation, she becomes hardened. She throws away the life she had before, disposes of all memories of her family. She moves to another part of Paris where no one will recognize her. "I have only one thing left to do," she says, "Nothing. I don't want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps."
Julie is played by Juliet Binoche and that makes Blue something special. Binoche is, of course, known for a variety of roles in films like Damage, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and her Oscar winning performance in The English Patient and what I have noticed is that she has one of the most expressive faces that I have ever seen. Even playing someone as callused as Julie, there is an emotion in her face and around her eyes that suggest everything that she won't outwardly reveal. In those other films she was able to express herself with her body and her voice. Here she keeps it all inside so we read her beautiful eyes for the turmoil within.
We don't know everything about Julie's past but from the pain in those eye we can guess that her marriage was not sunshine and roses. Indeed through the film we get clues to her unhappy life then and now. Julie does things to assess that her numbness from grief doesn't mean that she will never feel again. After the accident she goes and has sex with a man who was a friend of her husband. If this scene is shocking to you then you've missed the point.
Many movies begin by making everything clear and laying the entire plot on the table before our theater seats are even warm. 'Blue' is different, it follows a woman's journey to deal with grief in her own way. She doesn't always do things that make us happy as viewers. Blue is about a woman who has become cold to the world around her through the numbness of grief.