017 - Three Colors: Blue, 1993, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

017 - Three Colors: Blue, 1993, France, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

We begin in the undercarriage of the car, positioned just behind the right-front wheel, travelling briskly down the French freeway.  We hear the sounds of traffic and the sound of our own car.

The headlight beams shine in the tunnel.

A girl's hand reaches out the back-left window.  She is holding an empty sucker wrapper.  It flaps in the breeze.  It escapes her clutch and flies away.

The car stops for her to relieve herself in the woods.  We are under the car again, watching the brake line leaking as the girl comes back to the car.

A boy sits beside the open road, playing with his wooden game.  He hears the sounds of a great crash.  The car has run into a tree.  A beach ball falls out the open rear passenger door.  It rolls around behind the car.

When a ball rolls out from behind something, it means something.

We will watch M later this year, the classic 1931 German film directed by Fritz Lang and starring future Warner Bros. character actor Peter Lorre.

In that film, we see little Elsie Beckmann's ball roll out from behind a bush, and we know what has happened to her.

In this film, released 62 years later, we see little Anna de Courcy's ball roll out from inside the car,
and we know what has happened to her.

Julie de Courcy's eye is open.  We watch the man's reflection in her eyeball.  He stands.  She stares.  She lies in the hospital bed.  He delivers the news.  Your husband and daughter are dead.  She sinks.

Julie smashes open a window.  She hides.  The nurse comes running.   We see the nurse's reflection in the hallway on both sides, in the interior windows on the right and in the exterior windows on the left.  Julie sneaks into the lab and takes a handful of pills.  She shoves them into her mouth.  The nurse catches her.  She cannot do it.  She spits them out.

She is back in bed.  Her friend comes, Olivier, a composer with her husband.  He brings her a small, portable television.  Men are skydiving.  She watches the funeral on TV.  Her finger caresses the little casket of her daughter.

Krzysztoff Kieslowski is one of the great European directors.  He made ten one-hour-long films loosely based on the Ten Commandments, called The Dekalog.  He made a trilogy loosely based on the three colors of the French flag, beginning with this one.  He made several other features, all of them well-written, well-acted, and beautifully filmed.

He deals with free will, human freedom, choices and their consequences, relationships and crossing paths, doppelgangers, sin and forgiveness, grief and healing, death and resurrection, God and love.

He shoots reflections--in mirrors and windows, spoons and TV screens, walls and faces, water and eyeballs.  At the nursing home, she looks through the window, and we see her mother through the window and at the same time the reflection of two people walking behind us.  At a restaurant, she looks through the window and we see the mistress and at the same time, Julie's reflection.

He plays with light--deep, rich, beautiful light, shining, bending, reflecting, refracting, flickering, falling, spilling, stopping.  And blackouts.

He uses different cinematographers for different films to get different looks.

For this movie, he uses Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who also shot his 1991 film The Double Life of Veronique, which we will watch later this year, as well as films such as Gattaca (1997), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).

We look through stacks of rolled-up sheet music, like tubes, from one aisle to the other.  We look at Julie through a wrought-iron fence.

He uses music.  The composer does not merely compose the score, but three actors in this film play composers, and they are all working on the same score, and they have different styles, and we hear it as they compose it.  Play the strings.  Reduce the percussion.  Remove the trumpets.  Change the piano to a flute.

Yesterday, with The Last Metro, we saw how two different theatre directors had such distinct styles that a theatre critic could notice it and grow suspicious.

Today, with Three Colors: Blue, we see how two different composers have different styles, so that as they try to complete the work of the deceased composer, they have to choose which direction they will take.

The camera scans the music as if caressing it, and we hear what the camera sees.

In her grief Julie throws a concerto into a garbage truck, and as the sheet music folds over and tears, we hear the real music do the same.

It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

This film is about Julie's movement through grief, trying to complete her late husband's final composition, discovering hidden secrets, choosing to forgive, finding love.

And everyone, from all walks of life, of all ages, from every kind of profession, is given the opportunity, the choice, to love and to be loved.

In the film Jour de Fette, Jacques Tati featured an old woman bent over who gave commentary throughout the film.  She looked like the little old lady who lived in a shoe--or Mother Goose herself--and her commentary resembled the comedic relief of the Fool from the English Renaissance.

In the film Three Colors: Blue, Kieslowski also features an old woman bent over, but it portrays the struggle of life.  She is walking slowly down the sidewalk, carrying a single large glass bottle, taking it to a recycle bin.  When she arrives, the slot is higher up than she can reach.  She makes great effort to get it in.

While the one brings comedic relief, the other points to a hard-earned awareness of the world we inhabit--that it is difficult, that people are fragile and require help, that help may seem unavailable.  Does someone love this old woman?

One night Julie hears a great noise outside her apartment window.  She looks down at the street and sees three men abusing another man, throwing him to the ground and kicking him.  He escapes their clutches and runs into the lobby of her building below.  She hears him climbing the stairs and desperately pounding on every door on the way up, trying to find sanctuary from his pursuers.  He makes it to her door.  He pounds loudly.  He pleas.  He cries for help.  She stands and listens, as if trying to know what to do, but ultimately protecting herself from her own vulnerability.  She hears the attackers apprehend him outside her door and carry him back down the stairs, standing frozen in her own helplessness.  Does someone love this abused man?

A man plays music on the street, with a recorder.  It sounds as if he knows the tune Julie and Olivier are completing for her husband.  She asks the homeless man where he learned the tune.  He says he makes things up.  She catches him later arriving in an expensive car, getting out and kissing his beautiful wife, taking his place on the sidewalk to begin his work for the day--playing music, busking for money.  Who is this man?  Does someone love him?

Julie dips a sugar cube in her coffee, and we watch the liquid as it seeps up the cube and reaches her fingertips.

Julie visits her mother in the nursing home.  Her mother is played by the great Emmanuelle Riva, whom we just saw in the film Leon Morin, Priest, and whom we will see in Hiroshima Mon Amour.  Riva was 32 when she burst on the scene with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and she was 34 in Leon Morin, Priest.  She is now 66 in Three Colors: Blue, but they have made her up to look much older.

Her mother thinks she is her own sister.  Then she thinks she is Julie's sister.  She never does understand that she is Julie.  Does she still love her?

Antoine, the boy who witnessed the crash, brings Julie her cross necklace.  He found it at the crash site.  He gives it to her.  She gives it back to him, an act of love, a moment of grace.

The man with the recorder says, "You gotta always hold on to something."
Her mother says, "One can't give up everything."

Julie's neighbor works at a sex club.  She likes what she does, but she is shaken when her own father comes in as a paying customer.  Does someone love him?  Does someone love her?

Julie finishes her husband's composition.  It plays.  We hear it.  We see the people who have crossed her path--the boy, her mother, Lucille, the mistress, the ultrasound, the baby, Julie herself--and we think of the words of the song as we see the people and hear the words.

Imagine all the main characters coming back in images, in their lives, in their worlds, as you hear these words being sung by the symphonic chorale.

Though I speak / In tongues of men and of angels
If I have not love / I am like a noisy gong / Or a clanging cymbal
And though I have / The gift of prophecy / And can fathom all mysteries
And have faith to move mountains
If I have not love / I am nothing
Love is patient / Love is kind
It is not jealous or boastful / Love is not proud
Love bears all things / Believes all things / Hopes all things / Endures all things
Love never fails
For prophecies shall fade away / Tongues shall be stilled / And knowledge shall come to an end
But these shall remain / Faith, hope, and love
But the greatest of these is love.

This is available to all of them.

This is available to all of us.