Three Colors: Blue

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2017)

"Three Colors: Blue" is a film about Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her husband, a famous composer, and her young daughter in a car wreck. The film follows the weeks after this incident, and how she tries to cope with their deaths. It is a film about grief and loss, and the entirety of this film is spent focusing on Julie, and her enigmatic, but not too obscure thoughts and feelings during her grieving process. Towards the beginning, it seems she feels nothing. Her husband and daughter may have been the only people she really loved, so their death has forced Julie to stare into the void and contemplate the meaning of her existence, if there is any. She clearly wants to forget about them completely and try to start anew, selling all of their belongings that remind her of them, including her house, and moving away. She plays her husband's unfinished symphony, and when she gets to the unfinished emptiness, blue light crowds the screen and she is suddenly reminded of his death. She destroys her husband's unfinished symphony, believing it cannot possibly be finished by anyone because no one can replace him. She does, however, bring with her the blue light that was in one of her rooms, showing she doesn't yet have the strength to completely leave him behind.
Blue is obviously a very important color in this film, and it often represents longing and loneliness when it is used. For instance, Julie often goes to the pool on her own, and the water is often illuminating blue. She keeps coming back to it because she can't move past her family's death, no matter how hard she tries. The only other family member she visits is her mother, who barely remembers who she is. The use of color is pretty ingenious in many scenes, with green also symbolizing content occasionally. The music enriches this sense of longing, with Julie's husband's unfinished symphony being used again and again, each time with the screen fading to black mid-scene and fading back to the same scene. This symphony is a constant reminder of his absence, and the hole this has caused in her life. The cinematography is restrained and beautiful, perfectly exploring this character that is so perfectly portrayed by Juliette Binoche. Her performance in this film is just restrained enough to give us a sense of her true feelings while also seeming constantly complex and interesting. The end is one that I will probably think about for a long time after viewing.
There are hints that she may find a way to move past her grief, but there are also hits that she may never fully recover. It is clear that she wants to move past it, but continues to be pulled back down into her depression, and it seems part of her wants to continue thinking about him and wallowing in her misery forever, because it is all she has left to do. This is one of those rare films where the entire thing is a deep exploration of one character, almost through the visuals, editing, music, and Binoche's performance alone. There is a lot of symbolism to unpack and deliberate over. It truly takes a hold of the film medium to deliver a complex, thoughtful, and constantly mysterious study of one character dealing with grief. It's biggest strength is its incredibly enigmatic and unpredictable nature, yet this was occasionally a flaw upon first viewing. This is a film I will definitely watch more than once, that much I can say.