Modern Film Classics: Kieślowski’s “Three Colors: Blue”

"Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!” – The Simpsons

There is an accident. We see this not from the driver’s or passengers’ point of view. We see this in longshot, as if we were another car passing by it just moments before it happened, and the sight appears in our rear-view mirror. Just a sound; just enough to alarm; just not enough to betray the extent of the damage.

Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche) is the lone survivor of the crash that opens Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 film Three Colors: Blue. She is the wife of an accomplished classical music composer, arguably the most important in all of France. The accident kills him and their young daughter. As Julie recovers in the hospital, we find out that the media have been following her husband for months while he has been carrying on an affair, that the marriage was in trouble, and that the accident dealt Julie such a crushing blow that she was still in the hospital recuperating while the lavish public funeral for her family took place. She breaks into the hospital pharmacy, bent on killing herself with a lethal overdose, but is unsuccessful. She is eventually released and is left to deal with her grief while in an emotional stalemate. How paralyzed by grief is she? When Julie sees their faithful housekeeper upon her return, and asks her why she’s crying, the housekeeper replies, “Because you’re not”.

This is merely the first ten minutes or so of Blue. We follow Julie as she sizes up her life, contemplates her surroundings, and slowly builds a new life for herself, one away from the public eye. Julie returns to her maiden name, sells her home and belongings, provides for the housekeeper, and sets up in a small apartment in a nondescript area of Paris to try and live her life peacefully. She is quietly hostile and closed off to reporters asking her invasive questions about her emotional state. Thinking she could leave her past behind, there is but one relic from her past that haunts her: her husband’s final work, a symphony dedicated to the reunification of Europe under the EU banner, and it’s not yet complete. Should Julie carry on with her life, or should she honour her husband’s legacy by letting the piece play? Julie is herself a trained musical composer and could work on it.

To fully understand Kieślowski's film, one must look at the double meanings behind its title. The first of the three films in the celebrated Three Colors Trilogy,  Kieślowski intended the film to explore the colours of the French flag. Blue represents liberty and freedom, and here we see freedom in its cruelest form. Julie has been cruelly severed from everything in her life, but she wasn’t by any means shackled or burdened by her family. She loved her husband and child, and this notion of “freedom”, by  Kieślowski's interpretation, treats it in an abstract form, showing a discomfit between its conceptual manifestation and real, palpable tragedy. What it really connotes is choice and what one can do when there are no longer any responsibilities. Anyone who has lost a loved one, or even a job, can attest that its loss or grief can be frightening and bewildering.