Julie's attempt to divest herself of all links to her past by selling everything, breaking all ties with family and friends, taking back her maiden name, and embracing the anonymity afforded by the city of Paris is also a rejection of the hope of any future. Ironically, it is she who has created a prison for herself by taking with her a single object from her past life, a lamp made of strands of blue glass beads that shimmer like teardrops suspended in air. She makes this a repository of her grief and the centerpiece of her new world. This last element is a motif that appears in all three films of Kielowski's trilogy. Life must go on.
New life grows out of the old.
Everything is interconnected. Finally, it is Julie's past that demands a response from her. On seeing a news report that Olivier, a former colleague of her husband's, has agreed to complete his unfinished score for the concert for the Unification of Europe, a score that she thought she had destroyed, she learns that her husband had had a mistress and must confront the fact that her life had not been what she had believed. The discovery that her husband's mistress is also pregnant with his child, one final example of life's insistent continuity, provokes Julie to action. At tile same time, she takes up the task of revising and ultimately completing the score for the upcoming concert celebration.