Blue. Sad. But so Majestic and Grand

Rating: 9/10 (15 September 2006)

An outstanding work of the great late Mr. Kislowski. This time, the main heroine is impeccably performed by excellent Juliete Binoche and she plays with a mastery and skill that still admire after all these years. The film is truly blue, the main color scheme is really blue and then it suddenly turns to a Kislowski's most beloved honey yellow that it is a sheer pleasure to watch it. The main heroine suffers a death of her husband, a famous classical composer and her daughter in a car accident. She slowly starts to come back to life, and every time she has a real epiphany we hear a marvelous, deep, majestic music all around her. The woman becomes a new life, she sells her large house, buys a neat flat, meets new people and slowly returns to a normal way of life. She meets new neighbor, meets a former lover of her late husband, goes swimming... Life goes on, but up till the end, when she finally takes the work of writing the EU Anthem herself, that she finally comes back to this side of life. There are some very cool smaller details in the film - like, a bent old granny trashing the bottle, or a homeless flautist who anyway goes to his "work" in a luxurious car, or a scene of street fight late at night - everything is so sharp, precise and forms a full grand scale picture. The only slight minus of the film is a bit slower tempo that it really should have had, so that to make this work an absolute peak. However, this film stands out still...