With "Blue Film", the Polish director Kieslowski inaugurated in 1993 the "Three Colors" trilogy (Blue, White, and Red) dedicated to the French flag and the principles of the Revolution. The three films explore the principles of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, foundations of European civilization, in an intimate and emotional way rather than through socio-political implications, using the Revolution's slogans as points of departure for a deep ethical and existential reflection, initiated by Kieslowski with the monumental work of the Decalogue.
"Blue Film" illustrates the theme of freedom through the story of Julie (Juliette Binoche), a woman who loses her daughter and husband, a renowned musician working on a "Concerto for the Unification of Europe", in an accident from which she miraculously survives. Numbed by grief, without tears or even the strength to carry out her suicide attempt, Julie chooses the path of total solitude to carry out her journey of liberation from trauma and suffering, possible only by freeing herself from memories and love. Thus, Julie tries to erase the pain by eliminating all traces of her past: she decides to sell her house, takes back her maiden name, throws away the drafts of the composition her husband was working on. "I no longer want possessions, memories, friends, loves, or ties: they're all traps" she tells her mother. The woman wants to free herself not only from the relics that testify to a life that no longer belongs to her and the ties that trap her in pain, but from herself, through the denial of her own feelings.
Kieslowski entrusts the task of representing his reflections to the visual power of images and a narrative punctuated by allusions and symbols, reaching peaks of rare poetic and metaphysical intensity. The director does not narrate emotions through words; the mediation of language is inadequate to the will to communicate the pain of loss in a powerful and immediate way and the subsequent reaction. Kieslowski's choice is to focus the viewer's attention on objects, color, music; parts of everyday life that become symbols of an absence, a rupture. The theme of blue - the color of melancholy - runs through all the objects and environments in which Julie moves: the candy wrapper belonging to her daughter, the drop lamp, the water of the pool where Julie retreats seeking oblivion and a sort of purification from pain, a state of numbness, almost a return to the womb. Blue is also the visual sign indicating the resurfacing of memories in Julie’s mind; it is the color of the woman's past life that cannot be removed and that resurfaces through objects and sounds that echo it.
The past violently reappears through the musical flashes of the Concerto for Europe, which assail Julie in the pool and in her sleep. Kieslowski uses music as a symbol of the call to the past, but also to life: in fact, Julie's attempt to deny herself is doomed to fail, and her path of isolation will transform into a slow reclamation of self and existence. From the outside come some calls, to which Julie initially resists and opposes, such as the notes of her husband's composition. In her choice to escape the weight of memories, Julie continually sees the signs of the persistence of the past, as forgetting is an involuntary process, impossible to decide.
The decisive event for Julie will be discovering that her husband had a mistress expecting a child with him. The woman will have to accept that her husband's last tie to life is entrusted to this woman and the child to be born, to whom she will donate the house where Julie lived with her family: a gesture of abdication through which she can free herself from the past by giving it entirely to the other woman and the child. Julie's gesture is, at the same time, an act of surrender to life, which seems to flow through the cracks of an existence to create a new one. The painful acceptance of life and love, in their ambiguities and contradictions, will fulfill itself in completing her husband's composition and surrendering to the love of another man.
The text of the choir of the "Concerto for Europe" is taken from the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, which states that the only virtue that will survive time is love, here in the sense of the capacity not to remain indifferent, of a drive toward the world and others.
The finale reveals to us that absolute freedom from memory and oneself, as Julie sought, is nothing more than one's own negation and illusory; the human sense of survival makes it impossible to achieve indifference and solitude, because man cannot live without the other, and liberation from all that is human is nothing more than the dissolution of man himself. Love remains nevertheless in antithesis to freedom, not bringing serenity, carrying with it pain and misunderstanding. Kieslowski's deeply human gaze does not offer easy consolations: "Blue Film" does not conclude with an answer, but with the uncertainty of a doubt. Julie's cathartic weeping, which finally turns into a smile, leaves the question unanswered of whether it is a triumph to be able to abandon oneself to love and life, or the recording of the inexorable defeat of man who cannot renounce feeling nor the burden of suffering that inevitably entails, and of which he is a slave.
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