Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
by Manuela Lazić
Grief is more than losing someone who meant a lot to you and seeing a void where they once were; it also involves figuring out what to do with the reminders and remainders of them, the traces they have left behind. It’s an impossible problem: that person is gone, but they are still having an effect on you and your life, even in unexpected moments.
In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, Juliette Binoche’s character Julie eventually picks up swimming after the tragic deaths of her husband and daughter in a car crash. One evening, after she reaches the border of the pool and pushes herself up to get out, she suddenly stops all movement and stares straight ahead, as though she’s just seen something. Or is it the film’s orchestral score, bursting in right in this moment, that stops her in her tracks? Slowly, Julie slips back into the pool, then closes her eyes and gets her head underwater, her body facing down.
The orchestral piece heard on the score is in fact what her husband was working on before his death, and she was helping him with it — perhaps even writing it in his stead. Kieślowski presents grief like a song stuck in your head, a melody that can emerge to strike you in the gut when you least expect it and make you want to disappear. It’s at once a sentimental tune, full of love and melancholy, and a nuisance, a sinister weight that pushes you down and ruins everything. It is, after all, a useless kind of pain: crying or remembering won’t make the dead return.
That the Polish director and his writing collaborators chose to make Julie’s relationship with her husband less than idyllic helps emphasise this sometimes frustrating, even irritating facet of mourning: as we try to adjust to someone being out of our lives, we might start to see them in a different light, as if from the outside, and feel less inclined to tolerate elements of that relationship. Things that might have felt manageable when that person was here now feel like burdens they’ve left us with, poisoned gifts (or souvenirs) for us to remember them by. Perhaps this strangely cruel or unfair reaction — a kind of retroactive resentment — is what true regret is, and Kieślowski is interested in seeing how someone can process and make sense of these complex emotions through time.
When Julie hears that melody, the image sometimes fades to black: she is taken out of her current reality and into a place of pure, still darkness. Her grief stops time and follows her around, despite all her efforts to starve it by moving away and getting rid of all her possessions (after all, as the first instalment in the Three Colours trilogy, Blue is supposed to deal with the first concept in the French national motto, “liberty”). Binoche’s performance isn’t simply subdued — the blank mask she dons to play Julie is that of someone who has decided that “nothing’s important,” as the character says. She’s also always in movement, which Kieślowski emphasises with tracking shots and a dynamic camera (with photography by Sławomir Idziak), whether she’s swimming or scratching her fist against a stone wall as she walks. The opening sequence of the film shows the car’s journey, before it crashes, from different perspectives. Movement here is a part of life and death – ineluctable, at once energising and unforgiving.
Kieślowski was interested in fate and chance (perhaps most literally in Blind Chance [1987], where a man sees his life unfold in completely different ways depending on whether or not he manages to catch his train), but in Blue, that concern takes on a more complex and ultimately optimistic shape. Julie’s future is unknown and she herself claims not to care about it, yet as she moves through her pain and inevitably runs into memories and secrets from the past, she almost inadvertently discovers that her life isn’t over. She finds out that her husband had a mistress who is now pregnant with his child — a living metaphor for the way those who are gone continue to live with us and make us feel all kinds of ways, but also for how the world keeps turning.
That one part of a musical composition would be called a movement is no coincidence. The camera tracks the stave as Julie reads a sheet of music she and her husband had been working on and which she’d tried to get rid of. The score is heard on the soundtrack, as though Julie herself was bringing the music to life. After a certain point, there are no more notes on the piece of paper, but the music continues and so does the film: Julie can’t help but keep discovering what this piece has in store for her.