It has been almost a decade since I first gazed upon Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994). After re-watching his first entry, Blue (1993, on the newly issued Criterion Blu-Ray), I chastised myself for having taken so long. While I remember being moved by Blue - Kieslowski's work as a whole affects me - and loving the trilogy as a whole, I failed to account for my own evolving position as a subjective viewer. Obviously, Kieslowski's films, like those of Robert Bresson, do not objectively change over time. However, our impressions of the films are changed, charged, and altered by our own life experiences. For instance, my personal impressions of the losses that Julie (Juliette Binoche) experiences in the opening moments of Blue were compounded the second time around. The films haven't changed but I have gone from being an single teenager to a married twenty-something.
The beauty of Kieslowski is his ability to render specific life experiences into universal emotions. He begins Blue by stacking the deck in favor of Julie. During a country drive with her husband, a renowned composer, and young daughter, the brakes fail on Julie's car fail and her family is killed instantly. When she awakes in the hospital, she finds herself in the midst of an inescapable sorrow. She attempts to kill herself and realizes she cannot complete the task. Instead, she strips herself of her past and trades her country estate for a small apartment in Paris. She refuses to get involved when her neighbors start a petition to oust one of the residents; she wants to be an island. Her only escape from the sorrow of losing those closest to her is to ensure that no one gets through to her again.
Kieslowski represents this formally in fades to black as Julie attempts to shut everything and everyone out. She retreats to a twilight lit pool to swim laps...alone. She sits in a Parisian cafe, gazing into her reflection on a spoon...alone. She seduces Olivier (Benoît Régent), a friend of the family and composer colleague of her late husband, only to leave him with her abandoned home. Yet, she is incapable of being completely alone and free. She must turn to the comfort of strangers when mice inhabit her apartment or when segments of her husband's final, unfinished, composition - a suite celebrating the reunification of Europe - are discovered. Finally, Julie's defenses crumble and Kieslowski forces us to realize that we are never capable of complete social isolation. Again, he turns to film form to provide this insight as the musical suite cues up (beautifully composed by Zbigniew Preisner) and all of those moments of fades to black are overwritten by new memories and connections.
Kieslowski's film achieves emotional proximity via a variety of means. First, the film is structurally and formally rigorous without feeling mechanical. He achieves this paradoxical aesthetic by allowing the frame of cinematographer Sławomir Idziak to be beautiful yet blemished. For every perfectly lit, blue tinted, composition (see above), Idziak gives us medium-close ups that are framed a little awkwardly with regard to the characters' headroom. It reflects a crafted beauty, unique like the crystals in Julie's daughter's chandelier and the lives of those she encounters. Secondly, Kieslowski's direction of Binoche is amazing. It would have been easy to allow Julie to become the subject of an overcooked melodrama. Yet, while Kieslowski stacks our emotional deck in her favor in those opening moments, he is not afraid to expose her flaws - without moral judgment - and the consequences of her alienation (an approach that reminded me thematically and formally of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom).
There is a lot more that can be said about Blue, specifically in relation to the other films in the trilogy. I am ambivalent to write much more because the film, and Kieslowski, have the unique power to use simplicity to evoke personal revelations. The best part about re-visiting Blue for me was reflecting on how the film's emotional hold had not only remained but evolved towards me. I can only imagine what it must be like to watch the film as a single woman and then to revisit it as a married mother.
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