Blue is the examination of Julie (Juliette Binoche at her most reserved), who simultaneously loses her husband and child in a car crash in the film's opening moments. The accident is staged in striking fashion. We don't see the crash itself, as we could in so many Hollywood productions, but instead the immediate aftermath. True to life: for those of us who have been in accidents, what remains in the mind longer, the actual moment of impact, or the horrifying moments of realization immediately after?
Julie's husband was a world-famous classical composer, and his death is widely mourned. Julie's principal reaction to the deaths is to rid herself of all remembrances of her past life: selling the house, destroying her husband's papers and manuscripts, and cutting herself off from all past acquaintances. She rents a flat where she can continue to do "nothing" for the rest of her life.
But her life finds her. Her husband's colleague Olivier (Benoit Regent), who she slept with once after her husband's death, manages to track her down. She hears echoes of her husband's music in a flutist who plays on the street for change from passers-by. She also finds herself caring again, this time for a girl (Charlotte Very) in a neighboring flat who is hated by all the other residence because she is an exotic dancer and prostitute.
Blue is the story of Julie's coming-to-terms both with death and life: she is disgusted bu the sight of mice in her pantry, but is unable to clean up after a cat she has borrowed takes care of the mice. Eventually, she also has to deal with her husband's legacy, both in public and private life. While at first she was loath to be involved with either side, eventually, she finds herself capable of doing things she had refused to earlier. If Blue is liberty, then Julie finds herself emancipated from the conventional lot of a widow, the lot that she had chosen for herself.
I cannot say if Blue is uniquely French or not, since I am not as personally familiar with the language, country, or culture as perhaps I should be. Blue certainly does carry a flavor of the European continent, one which only rarely can be found in American movies.
Kieslowski is not an avant-garde director, but he does have his personal piquant touches, as in the staging of the automobile crash as noted above. He also shows a marked tendency for photographing individual body parts instead of the whole. Thus, in one scene, we see Julie's reaction to something she watches by the movement of her mouth and lips. Other shots are devoted to an eye, an arm, a back. Gloria Swanson may have had a face, but Juliette Binoche has dozens of bodily features that receive close scrutiny by the camera.
The film's title is justified by many scenes where blue is the dominant color. The camera also seems to feature a blue filter at many point. I am not sure if there is any specific symbolic meaning lent to the use of the color blue, or if it is just meant to be a sort of visual unifying thematic element: this stage in Julie's life is marked by the color blue.
The film's acting did not seem particularly extraordinary. Julie is a complex character, to be sure, but to my eyes, there was little to Binoche's performance beyond simple sadness and depression. It does take skill to convey blackness of the human soul, to be sure, but there was little illumination into the mechanics of her depression, and what finally brought her out of it.
The real standouts of the film were the screenplay, direction, cinematography, and music. Together, all these elements served to create an absolutely unique filmic portrayal of liberty.
Three-and-a-half stars
Copyright 1998 by Dale G. Abersold
