Three Colors: Blue

1993 drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: After a car crash claims the life of a famous composer and his daughter, his wife decides to withdraw from society.

There's a scene in this with a close up of a sugar cube. Kieslowski had to do research because the amounts of time the sugar cubes soaked up coffee ranged from three to eleven seconds, and the director needed it to happen in five seconds. You have to respect that attention to specific details and that artistic vision.

Kieslowski had his own film language, something he's experimenting with right here in this trilogy that finished his career. He's creating a tragedy focused on the idea of liberty, but it's a perverse sort of tragedy and a perverse look at that theme. Liberty, it seems, has more to do with a senile woman watching bungee-jumpers or tightrope walkers on an old television than anything that the average person can actually achieve. Kieslowski's experimentation is subtle, but it still brings a flash and, more importantly, really helps the viewer absorb the experiences with the main character. The most obvious cinematic touch is the director's use of fade-outs and fade-ins. You expect to fade out and then be carried to another scene, another setting, another character. The fade-outs are for comfortable transitions for the audience. Here, they're almost used for the character herself. We'll fade out and then immediately fade back in to see the character in the same exact position in the same exact location. The first time it happens, it's a little strange. When it happens twice more, you have to think about what it means. It's a nice trick, Kieslowski!

This is filled with lovely shots, some taking the William Carlos Williams wagon-and-chicken approach. Take that beach ball rolling away from a car accident, for example. Other shots give this a poetically otherworldly quality--a doctor reflected in Binoche's eye, the blue-tinted perspective from underneath a moving car, a close-up of Binoche watching a funeral, an old woman recycling a bottle (elderly people do that in each one of these color movies), a reflection in a spoon. Music's also vital to this, not just because the characters make their living creating it but because it enhances the visual experience. There's a recurring musical motif that manages to hit hard every single time. There's a great scene where Binoche's character is throwing away some music, and the sound mix there borders on cheesy but manages to really be effective. My favorite scene might be one where music is being composed, a scene that loses focus while instruments are being added and subtracted.

Juliette Binoche is wonderful. She injures a hand and threatens injury to teeth by eating a lollipop like my wife would. Binoche, as a character makes clear, is "not the type of woman a man cheats on or dumps," but it's not that she's just easy to look at in this movie. She's that, but she also brings a mystery in almost every expression and movement. There's a single moment when she breaks this stoic disconnect with a hearty laugh at a repeated punchline. And like all three of these movies, this ends with a simultaneous smile and tear.