1.Trois couleurs: Bleu

In an interview shortly before his death, Kieslowski was asked what it was he was trying to capture in all of his films:

“Perhaps the soul,” he responded. ” In any case, a truth which I myself haven’t found.

This is what he want us to reach in his movies especially in his highly acclaimed and last work as a director Trois Couleurs: Bleu , blanc & rouge .

The trilogy was conceived as a series of films that correspond to the colors of the French flag and the ideals each represents liberty, equality and brotherhood (fraternity).

“Millions of people have died for those ideals (liberty, equality, and fraternity).

We decided to see how these ideals are realized practically and what they mean today,” the director explained in an interview at the time.

“We looked very closely at the three ideas, how they functioned in everyday life, but from an individual’s point of view.”

The first film in the trilogy, Bleu,

asks if a person can ever be truly free, truly independent & centers around Julie Vignon de Courcy – played by the beautiful Juliette Binoche – as the wife of one of the world’s greatest modern composers (Patrice) with whom she has five year-old daughter.

One moment, Julie had everything; all life she wants & all the life can be.

The next, she had nothing her husband and daughter have been killed in a car accident and her own face is a patchwork of lacerations.

The physical recovery proves less difficult than the emotional one.

The movie might have moved through the familiar steps of tragedy, grief, recovery and triumph. But for Kieslowski, life is never this simple.

In the hospital, Julie tries to kill herself with an overdose of pills, but can’t go through with it. After her release, she attempts another sort of suicide psychologically that we can call “self-immolation” .

Julie’s grief is so profound that she cannot cry, nor even feel. She seems cold and silent, indifferent to her loss. Yet her body language tells us that she is in pain.

In one scene you can realize that in one of the most emotional scenes of the movie When Julie returns home ,she finds her housekeeper Marie crying

Julie asks her housekeeper why she is crying, the older woman replies it is because Julie isn’t.

This feeling become later her aspiration for absolute freedom in the form of isolation.

She sells her possessions and her home, not keeping any clothing or objects from her old life, except for a chandelier of blue beads that belonged to her daughter.

, puts her elderly mother in nursing home .destroys her composer husband’s last unfinished masterwork – Song for United Europe, and strives for anonymity.

“I want no belongings, no memories, no friends, no love,” she says. “Those are all traps.”

As a counterpoint to Julie’s futile quest, we see that her mother truly lives without connections, lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s, she mistakes Julie for her aunt Marie-France, who has apparently been dead for some years.

This is the idea about blue the director want to give us from the beginning

It’s about one woman’s attempt to retreat into invisibility, unable to go on living, yet unwilling to die. Her entire life is built around stagnancy, about never wanting to be involved with anything or anyone, and never having to make any decisions. Life can go on around her, but she wants no part of it.

Next, Julie moves into apartment in the middle of Paris, hoping that the painful memories would disappear in new environment. She finds herself involved in the lives of new acquaintances? And haunted by the symphony that her husband left unfinished. There she befriends neighbour Lucille (played by Charlotte Very) , Lucille is very similar to Julie, in which she has a tortured past which she tries to liberate herself from. She is very sexually-liberated, working as a stripper in a seedy nightclub. Julie becomes aware that she is not the only one who feels pain and isolation.

Later A young man, Antoine (Yann Tregouet), who’d witnessed the car crash while hitchhiking, brings her the necklace with crucifix he’d found at the scene and asks her about her husband, still alive when Antoine opened the car door, speaking the words: “Now try coughing.” Julie lightly laughs, explaining Patrice’s repeating the punch line of a joke he’d been telling her just before the crash; she says he can keep the necklace.

On a TV screen Julie sees herself included in a special report about Patrice, along with photographs of her husband with another woman and Olivier (her husband assistant ) announcing that he shall try to complete Patrice’s commission,

When she asks Olivier tells her of Patrice’s affair of several years with a young lawyer from Montparnasse. When Julie finds her husband’s mistress, the woman admits as much (“He loved me”), pregnant with his child & she asked Julie “Will you hate me?”

Because it becomes clear as the past and the present continue to force their way into Julie’s life and that perfect freedom is impossible…

Julie arranges for her husband’s mistress to have her husband’s house and recognition of his paternity on the child. This provokes her to begin a relationship with Olivier, and to resurrect her late husband’s last composition ” the Unity of Europe”,

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 epistole in Greek), and we see images of all the people Julie has affected by her actions.

she finds her true self once again In the closing scene, we find Julie accepting Olivier’s love at last, her face wet with tears pressed against a window, finally able to cry,

as we listen to the burgeoning strains of the chorus, “If I have not love, I am nothing.”

a new life emerges out of the ruins …

Kieslowski also wisely has many scenes not directly tied to Julie’s dilemma, but which link it to the other films in the trilogy. There is the scene of the old lady trying to deposit a bottle in a recycling bin, whose opening is too high for her to reach. It recurs in the other films, even though they are set in different locales. This is pure symbolism,

The other scene with linkage is when the courtroom scene from White becomes a small snippet of Blue. Later, all of these characters will appear at the end of Red…

Blue beyond the story :

Kieslowski, in the end, leaves you with more questions than answers. There is no clear ending to be found here. His characters depart the stories to live their lives along unknown new paths. The film leaves you with a montage of unforgettable imagery and a sense of understanding something that is bigger than yourself but still uniquely personal .

Cinematography

Kieslowski chooses to allow us into Julie’s world almost entirely through images, but how arresting those images are. In one scene, Julie sits in a cafe and listens to a street musician playing one of Patrice’s compositions; Kieslowski indicates how long she stays simply through the changing shadows cast by Julie’s coffee cup.

At four moments during the film, the screen fades completely and music swells – Patrice’s unfinished piece – and then the music cuts, and the scene fades back in at exactly the moment where it faded out. It’s part of the mystery of the film that a viewer can have an immediate and intuitive grasp on such an abstract device.

Watching this film you must keep aware that every shot, every element, everything is there for a reason …

The transparency of glass – how we can behold things through it although they remain untouchable – then becomes a theme running throughout the whole of the film. Up to and including the final frame. And that is just another example.

Then there’s the use of color – and one color in particular. In addition to blue filters and blue lighting, any number of objects are blue – a foil balloon, a tinted window, awnings, a folder, the walls of a room, coats, skirts, scarves, blouses, jeans, shirts, trash bags, crystals, a lollypop .

music

In addition, composer Zbigniew Preisner worked closely with Kieslowski to create the soundtrack and that music is critical to the power of the film. The music she must express is a key element to Julie’s lesson in independence and the film uses that distinctive creation to emphasize the plight of its heroine as much as it uses the color blue. This musical emphasis continues throughout the trilogy and, in fact, the team created a fictional composer who is referenced in each film – a musical touchstone for the characters. Because music is very important to the film Blue. It is centered on a piece of music, “Theme for the Unification of Europe,” which Julie’s husband was composing at the time of his death and which haunts her throughout her odyssey.

Listen to “Song for the Unification of Europe”

That piece of music raises another aspect of the film that can appear strange to us today looking through the prism of history.

Juliette Binoche

Kieślowski wrote Bleu with Binoche in mind — he told her agent he wouldn’t make the film if she couldn’t star — and it’s easy to see why. Binoche is among the most beautiful actresses in the world, yet she has a quality that is almost unique among their number: It’s rare that the faces of beautiful women are truly expressive, but Binoche, who speaks as little as possible in Bleu and never about her feelings, is able to make herself entirely transparent, to communicate everything that Julie is trying so hard to deny and to hide, as well as her struggle to do so.

She has been so consumed by grief that she has closed herself off even from her self – not able to cry and mourn for those she has lost.

Juliette Binoche, in what amounts to a one-woman show, turns in her best performance arguably her most accomplished ever. She manages to bring an element of humanity and sympathy to a potentially unsympathetic character.

writer

One reason Blue and the Three Colors trilogy succeeds so well is the taught unity in their vision and the depth of the characters. A great deal of that must go to scriptwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who Kieslowski had been working with since 1982.

Director

Few filmmakers have ended their careers on as high a note as Krzysztof Kieslowski did when he retired in 1994. it was referred as It was the retirement of a magician by Robert ebert He died less than two years later, but his late career included the awe-inspiring Decalogue in 1988, and the mystical Double Life of Veronique in 1991, followed by the ambitious Three Colors. Taken together, Blue, White, and Red are a visionary swan song for one of European cinema’s most poetic moralists.

Like Michelangelo Antonioni (but without the fetish for architecture), Kieslowski portrays these lives through images, without explanatory dialogue. This deeply metaphorical language produces a series of unforgettable impressions, none more elegant and powerful than the moment in Blue, when Julie (Juliette Binoche) takes a nighttime swim in a deserted pool, its waters suffused with blue light.

In conclusion, Kieslowski has done a masterful job combining the disparate elements of film-making together to emphasize his thesis– cinematography, music, lighting, and dialogue. It is a film that can be viewed again and again and interpreted as many ways. Truly representative of ‘film as literature’.

Blue the meaning

“Three Colors” is an epic of reconciliation, in which fragmented parts come together to make a whole, just as the three colors of the title create the French flag.

On one hand, the tragedy means the loss of everything that she has been so far in life, but on another, it represents the possibility of change and even liberation.

As Juliette discovers, life is unfair: we are governed more by chance of circumstance than by our own volition.

Blue as a color what it represents :

Blue, the color of memories

It’s the blue glass chandelier, it’s the blue candy. Things associated with Julie’s memory, the memory which she wants to rub off in her desperation to get rid of her pain, are all blue. So, even the notes of the music her husband composed are blue.

Blue, the color of liberty

Does liberty mean to be free from memories? To get rid of memories, and then to start afresh? Yes, you will be liberated definitely, but would that liberty be worth living for? Do you envy the liberty that now Julie’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer, has?

Blue, the color of darkness

Her neighbor Lucille touches the blue chandelier in one of the most touching scenes of the movie, when Julie imperceptibly becomes a tigress, she does not want anyone to touch her memories, her one memory that she has decided to linger over. Lucille says she had one like this in her childhood. So, what’s sacred to someone and special to someone, might be just something that “someone had also.”

Ironically, it is Julie who has created a prison for herself by taking with her a single object from her past life, a lamp made of strands of blue glass beads that shimmer like teardrops suspended in air. She makes this a repository of her grief and the centerpiece of her new world

Blue, the color of love

One of the most beautiful end credits I’ve ever seen, all the people connected directly or indirectly in the film are shown somehow connected to that one incident: the car crash.

Though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries,

If I have not love, I am nothing

These words assert that in one’s quest for freedom – “absolute freedom” – one may try to cut all the ties that bind the self to anything or anyone else so as to absorb all the knowledge that the universe can offer, to steadily progress towards the super-human. But if one has all of these things, and no one with whom to share them, then the bits and pieces of one’s existence amount to nothing. And is this not Julie’s story? Having attempted to cut herself free of all the things that bound her to others, the thoughts and actions and predicaments that made her subservient to others, she finally comes to realize that it is worthwhile pursuing the company of others

Since the sequence begins and ends with Julie, it seems as if all these people are now part of her. There is genuine closure as the film ends: she has completed the concerto and fulfilled the mourning… Having tried to live in “liberty” – without memory, desire, work, or commitment – she is ironically returning to love

This, Kieślowski implies, is the nightmare of a life absent connections — without them, how would we find meaning?

Like Dostoyevsky, Kieslowski seems to believe there is a cathartic aspect to suffering but he also believes in epiphany. At some point there has to be an understanding and transformation beyond the suffering. The existential response is insufficient for Kieslowski because the idea of complete liberty – complete independence – is obviously a destructive ideal for a society.

The Berlin Wall had fallen just a few years prior and there was a feeling of hope and optimism in Europe that Kieslowski – particularly as a Pole – was trying to express in his work. That idealism seems almost naïve today given the messy reality of the European Union and the uncomfortable tension that has followed Sept. 11.

Production

His work, even though it was filmed in France, and refers to the Europe of unification, has a wider, perhaps universal scope. It is in this wider context that we see the importance of his movie’s message, that the liberation of human being is conditioned on our ability to transcend the feelings that hold us hostage

Critics

Blue was admired by many critics. Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle said: “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” I’m not alone in thinking so highly of Blue. It is the recipient of numerous critical accolades, one of the most distinctive being the Best Picture award and the

Best Actress award for Juliette Binonche at the 1993 Venice Film Festival.

Also written about blue : even those viewers who don’t “get” all hidden meaning of BLUE, would probably sense that they had experienced an extraordinary piece of filmmaking.

Roger Ebert / March 9, 2003

In the trilogy “Red ” is the anti-romance “White ” is the anti-comedy, “Blue” is the anti-tragedy,,

And all three films hook us with immediate narrative interest.

Awards

The film deserved its multiple accolades, including winning the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival and the Spanish Academy Goya Awards, as well as a Silver Lion and a French Academy César for star Juliette Binoche .

Movie information:

Directed by: Krzysztof Kieślowski

Produced by: Marin Karmitz

Written by: Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Krzysztof Kieślowski

Agnieszka Holland

Edward Zebrowski

Starring:

Juliette Binoche

Benoît Régent

Emmanuelle Riva

Florence Pernel

Guillaume De Tonquédec

Music by Zbigniew Preisner

Cinematography: Sławomir Idziak

Editing by:

Jacques Witta

Distributed by Miramax (USA)

Release date(s) January 10, 1993

Running time: 100 min.

Language: French

for more:

• Three Colors: Blue at the IMDB

• Three Colors: Blue at Rotten Tomatoes

• Movie MovieMeter – Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993)

Download book: Grieving, Therapy, Cinema and Kies´lowski’s Trois Couleurs:Bleu by John Izod and Joanna Dovalis.

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