It is astonishing to think that Kieslowski's _Three Colors: Blue_,
which transformed my relationship with cinema, had its debut in
1993. For me, that was more than half a lifetime ago. A local
theater is running an "art-house classic" series, and Kieslowski's
trilogy is on the menu this month. To my utter surprise, the
theater was almost sold out; fully a quarter of the audience must
not have been born when _Blue_ was released.

The plot is deceptively simple. Julie (Binoche) is involved in
a car accident which also kills her world-famous composer husband
and her 5-year-old daughter. She withdraws into herself, breaking
off all personal and material ties. ("Blue" stands for freedom
in France, and hers is the purely negative world-annihilating
freedom espoused by French existentialists.) But her associates,
neighbors, and the music she has at least partly composed anonymously
-- these mystical, intangible connections between human beings which
are both burden and article-of-faith -- draw her back. Eventually
she works with her husband's assistant Olivier, who has long been in
love with her, to finish the powerful "Concerto for the Unification
of Europe." Bits and pieces of the piece are heard throughout the
film, but it only comes together at the very end -- accompanied by a
tour de force cinematic epiphany linking all characters in the film.

New viewings always yield fresh insights. I tend to focus less
on plots and formal elements in recent years in favor of characters
and acting. Binoche had to lobby hard for the role deemed too old
(age 33) for her then. Her Julie is hard and abrupt, probably not
only because of the traumatic accident. Now I wonder if Julie
isn't meant to be bother line autistic, as many musical geniuses
tend to be. She uses the minimum number of words possible when
she speaks. Co-writers Kieslowski and Piesiewcz are not native
French speakers, and her speech pattern and that of Olivier (Benoit
Regent) seems stilted, deliberately art-house. But this is likely
intentional; the supporting characters (neighbor Lucille played
by Charlotte Very, Florence Vignon's music archivist, Florence
Pernel's Sandrine, her ex-husband's mistress) all have softer,
more natural cadences. Julie seems to come from a different world.
Instead of words, she expresses herself non-verbally (like a
violinist)-- in her posture, her swimming, her abrupt gestures.
Even back then Binoche is a magnificent actress, especially since
she is playing against type. Kieslowski films a key phone call
with her back to the camera, and she indeed expresses more with
her neck muscles than most actresses with their faces. In fact
the body languages of all characters are so true. The hitchhiker
who witnesses the accident picks up his skateboard and run at
the car, then realizing the gravity, drops everything and just
run. There is such astonishing humanistic density in Kieslowski's
films, even one as deliberately sparsely populated as this.

The film's signature device is its loud bursts of music to mimic
Julie's active suppression of memories and emotions. (She also
throws away most belongings, sells her chateau, eats/annihilates
the blue foil-wrapped candy she had in the car ...) Fittingly,
there are no cinematic flashbacks either. It strikes me for
the first time today Julie must have done it before, is a survivor
who knows she can blank out trauma. It is also striking that she
does not seek solace from friends and relatives. What is her
childhood like? I imagine her (as a Julliard graduate might)
growing up in a boarding school, perhaps for kids with special
talents, alone and ignored by her parents. Despite that, and in
spite of her hard surface, Julie retains a core of decency. Sandrine
tells Julie her husband used to say his wife is good and generous,
because that is what she aspires to be; even his mistress can count
on her. That is the most deeply beautiful compliment of a character
I have ever heard in a film.

Suppression of memory inevitably conjure up the philosophical
question of identity, who we really are. After a traumatic
experience with rats in her new apartment she asks her nursing
-home-bound mother (Emmanuelle Riva) whether she was afraid of
mice as a child. Her mother remembers, but keeps mistaking Julie
for her dead sister! Julie has minimal family baggage. Kieslowski
is that rare type of director who never needs to settle familial
scores in his films. Instead they deal with philosophy, spirituality,
and justice. Law courts and lawyers seem to appear in every film,
and Julie's most pointed line is surely "you do not have the
right to do this." Social justice (not in the corrupted sense
used in the US now) is what drives this great humanist director.

The formal aspects of the film are of course astonishing. I have
forgotten the spectral aspects; in the first shots Anna looks
back at the cars behind her, and they are like malignant ghost
giving chase. Later flickering lights hover around Julie like
Holy Spirits insisting on the mystical connection of all things.
The screenplay is constructed like a brilliant concerto, with
motifs and counterpoints meticulously braided. Every location
or character recurs at least once; Terrence Malick's films have
a similar sense of musicality.

I am shocked to find out that Benoit Regent, who plays Oliver,
died of an aneurysm in 1994 soon after his cameo in _Red_. He
was barely 41; I never knew. Phillip Volter, the puppeteer in
_Double Life_ who has a minor role in _Blue_, supposedly killed
himself in 2005. Riva of course passed away recently; she is
so riveting in _Hiroshima Mon Amour_. Kieslowski died in
1996, and with it hopes of his next trilogy (seemingly never
completed). Ace cinematographer Slawomir Idziak last shot a film
in 2015, but Zbigniew Preisner, who gave the world all those
wonderful Kieslowski scores, is still going strong. Charlotte
Very (_A Winter's Tale_) made another film with Rohmer and has
mostly disappeared, while Florence Vignon, after her memorable
small role, co-wrote _Mademoiselle Chambon_ and other screenplays.
Binoche, of course, will be immortal.

So will _Three Colors: Blue_ -- much to my surprise! Critics
from the Village Voice and Film Comment made a concerted
attempt to whitewash Kieslowski out of cinematic history; the only
time he was mentioned in FC was when Binoche was interviewed!
But (perhaps in a meta-cinema moment, thank you Manohla Dargis),
like the "beautiful music" that Julie fails to destroy, Kieslowski's
films and legend will live long after those rags and their critics
are forgotten. The full house I saw _Blue_ with today is testimony
to our enduring covenant.

(for A.)

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