A Masterpiece!

A Major Disappointment

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The director and the cast made an amazing job in this film. What I liked most about this film is that every detail is very well-written and thinked. Moreover, the film itself has a cozy and comfortable atmosphere; I don't really know to how to explain this. In conclusion; the film deserves a 10/10 in my opinion.

"Three Colors: Blue" is a film about Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her husband, a famous composer, and her young daughter in a car wreck. The film follows the weeks after this incident, and how she tries to cope with their deaths. It is a film about grief and loss, and the entirety of this film is spent focusing on Julie, and her enigmatic, but not too obscure thoughts and feelings during her grieving process. Towards the beginning, it seems she feels nothing. Her husband and daughter may have been the only people she really loved, so their death has forced Julie to stare into the void and contemplate the meaning of her existence, if there is any. She clearly wants to forget about them completely and try to start anew, selling all of their belongings that remind her of them, including her house, and moving away. She plays her husband's unfinished symphony, and when she gets to the unfinished emptiness, blue light crowds the screen and she is suddenly reminded of his death. She destroys her husband's unfinished symphony, believing it cannot possibly be finished by anyone because no one can replace him. She does, however, bring with her the blue light that was in one of her rooms, showing she doesn't yet have the strength to completely leave him behind.Blue is obviously a very important color in this film, and it often represents longing and loneliness when it is used. For instance, Julie often goes to the pool on her own, and the water is often illuminating blue. She keeps coming back to it because she can't move past her family's death, no matter how hard she tries. The only other family member she visits is her mother, who barely remembers who she is. The use of color is pretty ingenious in many scenes, with green also symbolizing content occasionally. The music enriches this sense of longing, with Julie's husband's unfinished symphony being used again and again, each time with the screen fading to black mid-scene and fading back to the same scene. This symphony is a constant reminder of his absence, and the hole this has caused in her life. The cinematography is restrained and beautiful, perfectly exploring this character that is so perfectly portrayed by Juliette Binoche. Her performance in this film is just restrained enough to give us a sense of her true feelings while also seeming constantly complex and interesting. The end is one that I will probably think about for a long time after viewing. There are hints that she may find a way to move past her grief, but there are also hits that she may never fully recover. It is clear that she wants to move past it, but continues to be pulled back down into her depression, and it seems part of her wants to continue thinking about him and wallowing in her misery forever, because it is all she has left to do. This is one of those rare films where the entire thing is a deep exploration of one character, almost through the visuals, editing, music, and Binoche's performance alone. There is a lot of symbolism to unpack and deliberate over. It truly takes a hold of the film medium to deliver a complex, thoughtful, and constantly mysterious study of one character dealing with grief. It's biggest strength is its incredibly enigmatic and unpredictable nature, yet this was occasionally a flaw upon first viewing. This is a film I will definitely watch more than once, that much I can say.

How do we know what it is, essentially, that we liked about a movie? Which is to say, what do we know about this viewer who was affected by something he saw and it rang a chord? And what do we say of that experience, do we ascribe it outside of us?This is what we have here, questions of memory and meaning. A woman as viewer of a movie (played by Binoche as placid observer) taking spontaneous shape around her, that pokes holes in herself and provokes questions; finally overcoming it by being pulled forward by what was left incomplete in it.A woman who has lost everything as the film begins, every anchor in her life violently removed in one swoop and she's now cast adrift. We have the whole film as her own inner drift through an interminable flow. Kieslowski evokes this with lush dissonance between visual segments, cuts and fades that leave life in suspense. There is scant story, all about living with these fragments. Music erupts around her in sudden intervals; but music that's coming from inside of her and being hallucinated.It's the world of memory and inner life. Tarkovsky enters this with long, mystifying sweeps of the camera that lift bearings and slip into dreams and ruminations. Kieslowski by contrast caresses their outline, the surface of emotions as they glide over the eye. It's not difficult like Tarkovsky or Ruiz can be, but pleasant in the way of Kar Wai. It goes down rather easy, you can see it for just the surface shift.Kieslowski had spent the whole 10 hours of the Dekalog training this ability to dream in advance. It pays off here. Each of the 10 Dekalogs was about a narrative that an earth-shattering revelation comes along and creates a change in viewing. You will see this here obviously. But Dekalog had a contrast; some of it was Kieslowski opening corridors in the imagining with his camera, most was characters stumbling into revelations and articulating feelings. Here it's resolved in favor of the eye; the whole is about visual slippage through cracks in story.He lets blue lights shine on screen as music soars in crescendos, he gives us closeup shots of eyes; the eye that colors. At other points he introduces memory as images before a viewer: the funeral playing on a screen, images of her husband on TV that when shuffled through reveal a mistress. Most eloquently, images on TV of someone being cast over a void with a bungee chord as her anxiously precarious drift with nowhere to hold. She's fading from even the mind of her mother.For the end he reserves a tableaux of joined moments from lives as they are suspended briefly in mind. It's all being endlessly relived and combined like the music she works to complete with her composer friend. The music is central here. Not just as the memory of what was collaboratively lived with her composer husband, the emotion that was absorbed and now erupts again, but also as the sheet where an incomplete piece beckons for the work of continued imagination. The shot of this sheet as scribbled notes end and lines stretch interminably is the abstract heart at the bottom of it.Had another woman not made a copy of the score, it would have disappeared when she burnt it. Had she come by to pick up the photos of her husband, she might have burnt them with everything else and never found out about the mistress. But it's all this what pulls her out of herself.

I cannot be sure that Kieslowski cared much for the script of this film; otherwise he would not have made this 2-act film drawn out into the length of a 4-act. The symbols are there, elegantly shot perhaps, but not elegantly placed; the black screens and musical outbursts are overdone and obtrusive, to say the least. And when the widow, (shall we call her Ms. Blue? I don't remember her name) Ms. Blue, is given the cue for reflection (such as when waiting in the dark for an entire minute, deliberating on whether to open her apartment door to check on the remnants of a street fight), the actress "reflects" well -- but to what end? We get the feeling that Kieslowski is making a feature film from the pieces of a short film (what would be a fantastic short film!) and must slather a coat of cinematic, slow "art house" "reflective" paint over the missing pieces to hit a 80+ minute running time. Perhaps to make the film eligible for awards.It is a wonderful film, especially visually; unforgettable are the ultramarine swimming pool and a sugar cube absorbing coffee. But sugar cubes and swimming pools alone don't make for a feature film. The dramatic weight just isn't there, and the freshness of the visuals certainly don't mend the paucity.