Juliette Binoche delivers a raw, emotionally exhausting performance in "Blue", the first of the Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, which explores modern (or shall we say contemporary) life in France. It is an angry, harsh look at grief, and celebrates skillful acting by its leading lady.
Binoche plays Julie, who survives a tragic car accident which kills her five-year-old daughter and her husband. After failing to take her own life, Julie embarks on a mission to sponge away the memory of her family and her past, in order to come to terms with her survivor's guilt. Her path leads her into contact with a variety of characters with whom she learns to love again and make peace with what happened.
The film is absolutely grounded in Binoche who elevates an otherwise meandering and somewhat preachy film to the status of art. Her approach in the character is someone who is wounded but a fighter, and a person who refuses the help of others. In her pain she is aggressive but confused about her more violent tendencies. It is her silence which shows us the depths of her acting powers, as we learn so much about her emotional arc through her stillness and her eyes.
Her journey, we determine early on, will be completed through music. Julie's late husband was a world-renown composer, whose final, unfinished work was being written for the unification of Europe. Although it does not come until the very end of the film, it is understood from the beginning that she will have to complete the music herself. There is a hint that she wrote his music for him in life as well. Julie's story is guided by this music, a beautiful piece from Zbigniew Preisner, which fills the emptiness while we watch her in silence.
Apart from Binoche I found myself a bit let down by a plot that went nowhere filled with characters who purposes were unclear. She meets a boy who heard her husband's final words, a stripper who lives in the apartment beneath her, her dying mother, and the mistress of her late husband. The latter is the only character who seemed to shape her character enough for me to find the reasoning for its inclusion. The others seemed to be there for no other purpose than to give a more well-rounded depiction of France and to fill out a plot that is almost entirely dominated by one character.
I found the film to be full of metaphors and symbolism. Rife, rather. It became a bit of a chore trying to tease out the meaning in peculiar situations and characters which seemed to me fill the space for no other reason than to be "artsy". It succeeded at being "artsy" in a beautiful and not tiresome way, but only due to Binoche's unconventional choices and full commitment.
I have two final questions about this film, though they are two parts of the same whole. I first wonder why Kieslowski decided that he wanted to begin his series with such a somber film, dwelling in death. Does this mean that the series itself will be reborn, as Julie was? I then wondered why he chose to use this story as a representation of Blue. In the French flag blue is the symbol of liberty, at least in its most modern sense, post-Revolution, but I am unsure in what way this film symbolizes liberty, or if it was meant to at all. Is she free to be her own person now? Is knowledge the ultimate form of liberty? Is the tricolor simply a clever way to market Kieslowski's trilogy? I suppose I will have to watch the other two films and find out.
3/4
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