a beautiful film about loss and loneliness

Rating: 9/10 (2 March 2007)

This is one of the masterpieces of Kieslowski. A film that speaks about loneliness, grieving and death, which leaves you with a feeling of premonition, knowing that the director died a few years later leaving so many films undone.
This is the story of Julie acted by Juliette Binoche who loses her husband, a famous composer and young daughter in a car accident. After an unsuccessful tentative of suicide she leaves the house where she was living with her family and moves to Paris. In fact she is not sure what to do with her life, she does not know how to cope with the loss, she does not even know if she is capable of feeling anything any longer. While life goes on around her she seems to become kind of a spectator, tries to forget and disconnect from memories in order to alleviate the grieving. Even discovering that her husband had an affair with another woman who is expecting a child from him does not really shake her, although this seems to trigger a process of returning to reality. Will she close the circle? The end seems to say yes - on a factual plan at least - as she is finishing a composition that her husband worked at, and she is restarting a liaison with a friend and long time admirer, but we are not that sure that this also happens on an emotional plan. The last sequence seems to show the principal characters that crossed her path in the movie being each alone in his universe. Real life cannot be lived more than once, loneliness surrounds us in our awaiting for death.
Binoche acts beautifully, it's maybe her best role. The pace is slow, the tone is melancholic, but if you like human stories, that make you think and feel this is a movie that you would not miss.