Three Colors: Blue

Three Colors: Blue

French release poster
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
Produced by Marin Karmitz
Written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Agnieszka Holland
Edward Żebrowski
Starring Juliette Binoche
Benoît Régent
Emmanuelle Riva
Florence Pernel
Guillaume De Tonquédec
Music by Zbigniew Preisner
Cinematography Sławomir Idziak
Edited by Jacques Witta
Production
company
Eurimages
France 3 Cinéma
Canal+
Distributed by MK2 Diffusion (France)
Miramax (US)
Release dates
  • 10 January 1993 (Warsaw)
  • 8 September 1993 (France)
Running time
 94 minutes
Country France
Poland
Switzerland
Language French
Polish
Box office $1,324,974 (US)[1]

Three Colors: Blue (French: Trois couleurs: Bleu) is a 1993 French drama film written, produced, and directed by the acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue is the first of three films that comprise The Three Colors Trilogy, themed on the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it is followed by White and Red. According to Kieślowski, the subject of the film is liberty, specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political meaning.[2]

Set in Paris, the film is about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident. Suddenly set free from her familial bonds, she attempts to cut herself off from everything and live in isolation from her former ties, but finds that she cannot free herself from human connections.[3]

Plot

Julie (Juliette Binoche), wife of the famous composer Patrice de Courcy, must cope with the death of her husband and daughter in an automobile accident she herself survives. While recovering in the hospital, Julie attempts suicide by overdose, but cannot swallow the pills. After being released from the hospital, Julie closes up the house she lived in with her family and takes an apartment in Paris without telling anyone. She leaves behind all her clothes and possessions, taking only a chandelier of blue beads that presumably belonged to her daughter.

For the remainder of the film, Julie disassociates herself from all past memories and distances herself from former friendships, as can be derived from a conversation she has with her mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and believes Julie is her own sister Marie-France. She also destroys the score for her late husband's last commissioned, though unfinished, work—a piece celebrating European unity, following the end of the Cold War. It is strongly suggested that she wrote, or at least co-wrote, her husband's last work. Snatches of the music haunt her throughout the film, although this is equally consistent with just being illustrative of the depth of their relationship.

She reluctantly befriends an exotic dancer named Lucille (Charlotte Véry) who is having an affair with one of the neighbors and helps her when she needs moral support. Despite her desire to live anonymously and alone, life in Paris forces Julie to confront elements of her past that she would rather not face, including Olivier (Benoît Régent), a friend of the couple. Olivier is also a composer and former assistant of Patrice's at the conservatory. He is in love with Julie, and suspects that she is in fact the true author of her late husband's music. Olivier appears in a TV interview announcing that he shall try to complete Patrice's commission. Julie also discovers that her late husband was having an affair.

While trying both to stop Olivier from completing the score, and finding out who her husband's mistress was, she becomes more engaged in her former life. She tracks down Sandrine (Florence Pernel), Patrice's mistress, and finds out that she is carrying his child; Julie arranges for her to have her husband's house and recognition of his paternity for the child. This provokes her to begin a relationship with Olivier, and to resurrect her late husband's last composition, which has been changing according to her notes on Olivier's work. Olivier decides not to incorporate the changes suggested by Julie, stating that this piece is now his music and has ceased to be Patrice's. He says that she must either accept his composition with all its roughness or she must allow people to know the truth about her composition. She agrees on the grounds that the truth about her husband's music would not be revealed as her own work. [no such 'agreement' occurs, Julie calls Olivier back and agrees to bring the score that she has finished. There is an implication that she has hidden her own work behind the public face of her husband, at the beginning of the film a journalist asks Julie if she is the author of her husband's work. Julie avoids the question.

In the final sequence, the Unity of Europe piece is played (which features chorus and a solo soprano singing Saint Paul's 1 Corinthians 13 epistle in Greek), and images are seen of all the people Julie has affected by her actions. The final image is of Julie, crying—the second time she does so in the film.[4]

Cast

Symbols

Music plays an intricate element of the plot in that it illustrates Julie's efforts to be isolated from everything but cannot do it, such as music cannot be made with a single note but through harmony with all others and how everyone has (or represents) a different kind of music, such as the union of Julie/Patrice had a special tone, which is quite different and more raw with the union of Julie/Olivier.[5][6]

A symbol common to the three films is that of an underlying link or thing that keeps the protagonist linked to his/her past. In the case of Blue, it is the lamp of blue beads and a symbol seen throughout the film in the TV of people falling (doing either sky diving or bungee jumping), the director is careful in showing falls with no cords at the beginning of the film but as the story develops the image of cords becomes more and more apparent as a symbol of a link to the past. In the case of White the item that links Karol to his past is a 2 Fr. coin and a plaster bust of Marianne[7] that he steals from an antique store in Paris. In the case of Red the judge never closes or locks his doors and his fountain pen, which stops working at a crucial point in the story.[8]

Another recurring image related to the spirit of the film is that of elderly people recycling bottles: In Three Colors: Blue, an old woman in Paris is recycling bottles and Julie does not notice her (in the spirit of freedom), in Three Colors: White, an old man also in Paris is trying to recycle a bottle but cannot reach the container and Karol looks at him with a sinister grin on his face (in the spirit of equality) and in Three Colors: Red an old woman cannot reach the hole of the container and Valentine helps her (in the spirit of fraternity).

Production

Blue was an international co-production between the French companies CED Productions, Eurimages, France 3 Cinéma, and MK2 Productions, the Swiss company CAB Productions and the Polish company Studio Filmowe TOR.

Like the other films in the trilogy, Blue makes frequent visual allusions to its title: numerous scenes are shot with blue filters or blue lighting, and many objects are blue. When Julie thinks about the musical score that she has tried to destroy, blue light overwhelms the screen. The film also includes several references to the colors of the tricolor that inspired Kieślowski's trilogy: several scenes are dominated by red light, and in one scene, children dressed in white bathing suits with red floaters jump into the blue swimming pool. Another scene features a link with the next film in the trilogy: spotting the lawyer Sandrine, her husband's mistress, Julie is seen entering a courtroom where Karol, the Polish main character of White, is being divorced by Dominique, his estranged French wife.

Reception

Three Colors: Blue has received universally positive reviews, 8.5 out of 10 on Tomatometer and 93% audience likes, according to those collated on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator site[9] while Internet Movie Database (IMDB) rates it 8.0 out of 10.[10]

Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle said:[11]

Blue is a film that engages the mind, challenges the senses, implores a resolution, and tells, with aesthetic grace and formal elegance, a good story and a political allegory.

Evangeline Spachis of the GirlonFilm states that:[12]

Blue is a visual and arousing cinematic experience, one that deserves repeated and in-depth viewings.

Derek Malcolm of the Guardian commented on the film as:[13]

Blue remains an intense and moving tribute to the woman at its centre who, in coming back from tragedy, almost refuses, but ultimately accepts the only real love that's on offer.

Soundtrack

Awards

References

  1. ↑ Three Colors: Blue at Box Office Mojo
  2. ↑ Three Colors: Blue, Bonus Features: Commentary by Anne Insdorf, A Look at "Blue".
  3. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. Edited by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 212.
  4. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof, and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Three Colours Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. Translated by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
  5. ↑ Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. Edited by Danusia Stok. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 224.
  6. ↑ Insdorf, Annette. Double Lives, Second Chances: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. New York: Hyperion, 1999, p. 140.
  7. ↑ Studies in Eastern European Cinema, volume 2, number 1 (2011-03-01), p. 75
  8. ↑ Leong, Anthony. "Demystifying Three Colors: Blue". Media Circus. Retrieved 30 October 2011.
  9. ↑ "Three Colors: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu) (1993)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-07-11.
  10. ↑ "IMDB rating". IMDB. 2014. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  11. ↑ Baumgarten, Marjorie. "Calendar: Film Listings - Blue", The Austin Chronicle, March 18, 1994. Accessed May 21, 2007.
  12. ↑ "Girl on Film". Girl on Film. 2014. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Derek Malcolm". Derek Malcolm. 14 October 1993. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
  14. ↑ "Three Colors Blue (1993)". Swedish Film Institute. 23 March 2014.

External links