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Something
old, something blue. When one is weary of the constant
stream of the new, food for the soul from that inexhaustible
library of film classics that lend themselves to repeated
viewings.
A car crashes
into a tree somewhere in the French countryside, taking the lives
of Julie's (Juliette Binoche) husband, composer Patrice de
Courcy, and daughter, Anna. Legendary Polish director Krystof Kieślowski
(1941-1996) begins his 1993 masterpiece
Blue
with tragedy,
but it is a beginning that transforms itself into a delicate and
sophisticated meditation on the theme of liberty in all the senses
that matter on an individual level: physical, emotional, intellectual. The first
film in the
Trois
Couleurs Trilogy
(for the French revolutionary ideals—Blue for liberty,
White for equality, and Red for fraternity),
Blue
is scored throughout with the color blue, a color which is
redolent
with dolor but can also sparkle with the happiness of clear skies
and calm water. Blue filters, blue lighting, the cerulean
foil of a lollipop wrapper, sapphire of swimming pool, lovely
ultramarine glass of chandelier. Binoche’s blue funk as she
moves through the film with a vulnerable resilience, her face
which has something of the gamine all controlled emotion as she
lives through all the shades of grief and mourning.
Julie gives
up the large country house with all its trappings, moves
to Paris where she attempts to find solace in anonymity.
That is until her
husband’s old artistic collaborator, Olivier (Benôit Régent),
who has always been in love with her, tracks her down.
Olivier has been working on her husband’s unfinished composition
Concerto for The Unification of Europe, but a mystery
persists as to the work’s authorship. Liberty here is
learning to love again, make music again. The music in
Blue,
composed by Zbigniew Preisner, possesses a mystical azure
particularly in the last (montage) sequence in the film, a musical
adaptation of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians (lovely
lines with images of tinkling cymbals and sounding brass that lead
to the notion of a music that is true, the spiritual inner voice,
not the hollow resonance of the thoughtless repetition of tired
ideas....)
Kieślowski’s
very genius is his spiritual quality—the soul music in his
mythological stories,
his appreciation for character and faces, a certain studied nuance
that has nothing of the vague about it.
Blue
is an ode to
the life lived as a symphony. Kieslowski who linked his films
with repeated images, and often used the same actors over and over
again, adds another dimension to the idea of grief, memory, and
love by casting Emmanuelle Riva from
Hiroshima Mon
Amour
to play Binoche’s aging mother.
See:
Blue
See:
Trois
Couleurs Trilogy
See:
Hiroshima Mon
Amour
From the
eCognoscente archives, another film in shades of blue:
Before the
Rains
Tags:
film literature
france
duras
kieslowski
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