Emotional Liberty

Rating: 5/10 (23 August 2019)

"Three Colours: Blue" is the first part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy, the other parts being White and Red. These are, of course, the colours of the French flag, and according to Kieslowski these three colours symbolise respectively liberty, equality, and fraternity, although this is not an interpretation that has ever officially been adopted by the French government.
The central character is Julie, a young woman whose husband Patrice, a famous composer, and young daughter Anna are killed in a car accident. Julie herself is also involved in the accident, but survives without serious injury. Her way of attempting to rebuild her life is to cut herself off from everything she has known before. She sells the family's elegant country house and moves to a small flat in Paris. She distances herself from old friends, staying in touch only with her elderly mother, but this does not really count as a tie to the past because her mother, suffering from senile dementia, no longer recognises her. She destroys the unfinished score of the work her husband was working on at the time of his death.
Cutting herself off from her past, however, proves to be more difficult than Julie had anticipated, especially after it emerges that a second copy of Patrice's score has survived and that his friend and fellow-composer Olivier Benoît intends to complete it. (The piece is always referred to as a "concerto", but the piece we actually hear, a setting for soprano, choir and orchestra of words from Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, is not a concerto in the sense in which classical musicians would normally understand the term. Perhaps Olivier has radically altered Patrice's conception of the work). Julie also discovers that her husband had a mistress, Sandrine, who is pregnant with his child.
So what has this story to do with liberty? Kieslowski was clearly asked this question himself, and his answer was that the film is not about political liberty (which is how the French revolutionaries would have understood the word) but about "emotional liberty", a rather more nebulous concept. Julie wants to free herself from all emotional bonds but finds that she is unable to do so. No man, and no woman, is an island.
Besides being the supposed colour of liberty, the word "Blue" has some more literal meanings in this film. In keeping with the sombre theme Kieslowski uses a restrained palette with few bright colours; whites, greys, browns and dull blues and greens are the predominant hues. One of the few brightly coloured objects, however, is a mobile of bright blue beads, which is one of the few possessions which Julie keeps from her previous life and which presumably has some significant meaning for her. (It may have belonged to her dead daughter). Some scenes are also shot under blue light.
For a film which deals with what must be among the most traumatic situations imaginable- a young woman suddenly and tragically losing her husband and her only child- the emotional temperature is always far too cool. Julie's attempt to cut herself off from her former life only makes sense if one interprets it not as callousness but as the only strategy she can think of to deal with her extreme grief, yet I never got much sense of this from Juliette Binoche's rather restrained performance. "Three Colours: Blue" is, technically and aesthetically, a well-made film, yet watching it again recently for the first time in many years reminded me why Kieslowski has never been among my favourite directors. 5/10