“Three Colours: Blue” is the numero uno in the trilogy by late director Krzysztof Kieślowski. It is a somber journey of a woman’s grief. The visuals following the title has tints and shades of the colour never as a distraction of an unnecessary prop but an aiding symbol and landmark of the sorrow unexpressed, words unsaid and tears that never made it to the earth. A painting of pain through isolation, introspection and suppression, it is an exercise to listen and observe the back ground behind and away from its characters.A close tire, we watch its treads merging into a smooth surface, a tunnel ride, we see that through the vehicle sounds it diminishes and a little girl, through the rear wind shield staring with blank eyes and unreceptive stare with still an innocence to charm. A young boy with a skate board is on his side walks asking for a lift, the car passes and the boy continues his handy game. His face is drawn suddenly towards the direction of from where the loud sound of the crash comes. If the car would have stopped for the lift, it would have survived. Is it the point or does the director teases us in these thoughts of fate and missed opportunities? It is neither but a tragic start for the sole survivor of the crash, Julie (Juliette Binoche). Her husband a great composer pending to play his music for marking the “unity of Europe” is killed in the crash along with their daughter.
Julie does not cry or react. She could not commit suicide not for any reason but simply cannot. The film begins the viewer as the stranger to her sorrow. We are sympathetic but are we really sympathetic to leave our work and console her? We are in that stage of pausing a second for her but moving on with life, not because we are boorish rather the help is to leave her alone. Julie precisely does that. She decides to wipe the memories, objects and pieces of her loved ones. She tells the lawyer to sell the house and the furniture. She sleeps with her husband’s friend or assistant whom she knew he loved her. She does that not for company but for the pain of guilt. She rubs her fist through stone walls to feel and to punish herself. Out of every sold piece, she keeps a chandelier of blue coloured stones. In the desperate eradication of memories, Julie as any other person in deep grief cannot erase everything. For better or worse, stones with stains of past lacerations take immense impossible measures to neutralize those permanently.
She even destroys the half composed music of her husband but the music she has seen keeps on playing in her mind. At distress, she blacks out in her heard to the sounds and comes back. Director Kieślowski darks the screen for that to return and seasons the viewer with the sadness. The situation is tragic and Julie of course in a state of homeless feeling in her mourning. As any broken heart would do, she cuts off the risk of knowing some one. In desolation and doing nothing, she feels safe. When relapses occur, she dissolves her tears through swimming in the blue water.
A sad film with profound details attended real close in photography. In the mood of dull air, the film punctuates with sudden sounds, a sliding light and a fluid motion to provide energy of drunkenness. Juliette Binoche encapsulates the stern Julie not expressing but has a calculated rudeness wherein one empathizes but still be hurt. She is spectacular when she eats the blue candy in a hurried motion as if slowing it down will make her breakdown rapidly. It is wrapped in a toffee paper which we have seen the tender hands of her child flapping against air through the car window. The secondary information becomes the aesthetic guidance to the primary object. This gets applied to the faces and back ground sounds, a sugar cube’s tip on the surface of a coffee and a street flute player in one side of the screen with the other side a coffee shop door.
It is a navigational tool in to a woman separating her from human contact recuperates and rejoins the life through subtle contact by them. One wonders what the symbolic significance of the colour is apart from its visual depiction. Blue is her sorrow, pain, solitude, anger, guilt but of all a masquerade for those under which she relaxes to release them submersing herself into the colour.
No comments:
Post a Comment