Friday 24 June 2011

Trois Couleurs: Bleu - Three Colours: Blue

1993 by Krzysztof Keislowski

The renowned Polish director made a triology of films in French, as an international production, and based the three films on the French Tri color , Blue, White and Red. The movie Blue, hence has Liberty as its theme. The main character of Blue seeks liberty from emotions.

Julie survives an accident, but lose her husband and daughter. Julie leaves the place and rents out an apartment in Paris. She wants to keep away from everything connected to her past. However, she can't be all alone as she comes across other lives, like a kind whore and slowly she realises that her husband had a mistress who is carrying now. But she too had some affair that she cannot hate the mistress. 

This movie is visually stunning. I cant help screaming it, its stunningly brilliant. Not just for its brilliant use of blue, but the cinematography raises this movie to another level. Dialogues are kept to a minimum, but I thought the camera was very eloquent.

The script is brilliant, trying to picturise a woman who wants to escape the emotions, but the final shot of the movie shows a crying Julie. Her scene with her mother (who mistakes her as her dead sister), with the whore who works in one of those explicit sex centres in Pigalle, all were touching and brilliant. In between it also brings out the fact that Julie wrote most or parts of the music for her dead husband, who was a famous contemporary musician.The movie ends when Julie finishes her husbands uncompleted work and offers assistance for her husbands mistress. She is also happy to find some solace in sex and love.  It was also quite brilliant, in between, that the whore is picturised as the most kind person from the locality, as the only person to help the sick street musician.

In fact, music is as important as the camera in this movie. A bit of her husbands music is brilliantly used at various points in this movie. This was simply wonderful. It was stunning how the music started all on a sudden on particular moments. And some of the camera movements together with this music, like when Julie runs her fingers through the music notations, were stunningly brilliant. Music is played only for short moments in parts, but it plays such an important part that the movie is almost a musical for me.

I will have to say Juliet Binoche lives as Julie. Who else to do this part. Juliet, Music and Cinematography is the heart and spine of this movie. And salute to this wonderful director, the brain behind this movie. A movie which should have been a tragedy is made to be quite an anti-tragedy.