Moody blues.

Rating: 9/10 (12 April 2008)

I had a hard time motivating myself to watch Bleu, which I have only ever heard glowing reviews about. People have been recommending the movie to me literally for several years, and I never got around to watching it until last night, after I recently purchased the trilogy for a whopping 30 yuan (about $4.25), thanks to China's total indifference to copyright laws.
The movie is suitably depressing and highly artistic, and although some of the technical experiments didn't really work for me, the story itself is outstanding. Early in the movie there is a clumsy use of a flashing blue screen that might remind some Hitchcock fans of the psychological use of color in Vertigo, but it's one of the examples of the overuse of blue in the movie that came to me to be a little redundant. The movie is called Blue and it's an emotional color, I don't think we really need to be hit over the head with it so many times.
Juliette Binoche stars as Julie Vignon, the wife of a famous composer who dies in a car crash, along with their daughter, throwing her entire life into total emotional chaos. She responds by trying to erase her memories of her lost past. She sells all of her possessions, moves to a new place, and goes back to her maiden name. Throughout this time, she immerses herself in her sadness, just like that astonishingly blue swimming pool.
Obviously, music is an extremely important part of the film, it takes us on an entirely separate journey through Julie's sadness and emotional development. The movie illustrates her loss of feeling, her inability to form meaningful connections with other people after her catastrophic loss, and through the thoroughly unexpected turns of events that take place throughout the movie to allow her life to continue, in completely unexpected directions.
There is a lot of focus on minute details in the film, long shots that focus on seemingly trivial objects but that create a surreal environment that is almost impossible to create in any other way, similar to the effect that Binoche gets with her particular style of under-acting. There are a few moments in the film when the screen fades to black for a few seconds and then fades back in to exactly the same shot. I imagine Kieslowski was going for some kind of temporary mental blackout, triggered by an emotion or a sudden painful memory, but it just came across as campy to me.
Nevertheless, the movie has such a powerful and involving story that it's easy to overlook things like this, although this is certainly not the feel good movie of the year. By far the film's best feature is the story, which is brilliantly written and takes us on a fascinating journey, followed by the stupendous performances. Kieslowski is not one of our most accessible directors, but certainly one of the most enduring.