In this interview the late Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, describes how he shot a scene from Trois Couleurs: Bleu (or Three Colors: Blue) with Juliette Binoche. This was part one of a trilogy which was loosely based on the French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The first film, Blue was meant to deal with liberty. In this case, it is not political liberty but personal liberty.
I appreciate his obsessive discussion of exactly how many seconds it takes for a sugar cube to be soaked with coffee. That might be the litmus test to separate the director/artists from the hacks. Do you care how many seconds it takes for a sugar cube to be browned with coffee? Different directors might have different answers but you should know why you think that, either intuitively or by some other reasoning.
[Spoiler alert - or I guess this entire thing is a spoiler alert including the videos.]
The main character, Julie, loses her entire family (husband and daughter) in the first few minutes of the film. The rest of the film shows her reactions to this, from initially half-heartedly attempting suicide, to then cutting herself off completely from her former life, friends–everyone.
In a perverse twist liberty here means a devastating free fall. At some point in the film Julie watches a bungee jumper on TV and you sense a similar fall and feeling of panic in her liberty. A paradox: freedom is a good thing but it can also be disorienting and scary at times.
A “trailer” of sorts. A brief introduction to the film, without words. Music plays a huge part in the story as Julie’s husband was a composer and it is hinted that she contributed to the music as well. Here Kieslowski is using pure cinema–telling a story without words.
It is music that often intrudes on Julie despite her attempts to escape everything. It happens at moments when her defenses are down, right before sleep, or here as she wakes up from a nap. All the emotion and grief rushes and intrudes upon her and the entire screen goes to blue and then black. This is a brilliant evocation of that state and Kieslowski does so without warning or explanation. The film creates a new visual and emotional language at times using colors and repeating musical themes, building to the finale.
This scene contains the most explicit statement of the film, where Julie tells her mother that love and life are “a trap” and she is done with it all. She rejected actual suicide but seems to be trying to commit spiritual or emotional suicide and in essence exist as if dead among the living. She tells her mother,
Before I was happy. I loved them. They loved me too….Now, I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don’t want any belongings, any memories. No friends. No love. Those are all traps.
The paradox and brilliance of Binoche’s performance is that she seems cold, uncaring, and half dead herself, no more so in this scene, but in fact it is just the opposite. Her pain is so deep that she has to completely bury it. Almost as if she lets her self begin to cry, she will never stop. So she attempts to cut off all feeling, all contact.
Her world narrows to a barely furnished apartment, and daily rituals she can concentrate on (the cafe, the cup of coffee, the sugar cube). Occasionally her attention is drawn to the outside, usually by music and in the scene above by Olivier. But despite all these efforts to cut herself off, she finds it impossible in the end and is drawn into a friendship with a neighbor and she discovers some things about her husband which maybe make her question how idyllic her marriage was. This enables her to look at Oliver in a new light, although in typical Kieslowski fashion none of this is stated specifically.
Here all the themes come together and Julie finally returns to life and is with Oliver. This scene is different from the first time they were together. That was after Julie has burned all her effects and there is only a mattress left in her house. A mattress they make love on, but she is cold, distant, almost robotic in that scene. Oliver wakes up to her having left, trailing her knuckles along the side of the house, bloodying them so as to feel something, or maybe punish herself for having survived when her family didn’t.
This time she is present, happy and has returned to life, but I always found something puzzling about that shot. In most ways, it is a happy, joyful ending, a return to life. Julie made the right choice and there is an enormous sense of relief , a catharsis on the part of the viewer, but then he shows her making love to Oliver pressed up against a pane of glass, which is revealed to be a fish tank as the camera pulls back.
When I first saw it, it took me out of the ecstatic moment and I thought, why is he shooting her through a fish tank? It was only when I watched it again recently that I understood that was exactly what Kieslowski wanted to do. She is “trapped” again, in love, under water, under glass, and not much separates the state of ecstasy from devastation, loss. Call it what you want, the tender trap, the tender snare, there is always the risk of losing it.
On the one hand, we should all be so lucky to be caught in the snare, suspended with invisible wires above the rest of the world, as in a Chagall painting, or levitating above the others who are just getting by, going to-and-fro in their daily routines. That is what love does, changes how time moves and us, but then there is always the risk of the fall. Has anyone ever escaped it? Is it even wise to try?
Julie tries for a while, but liberty can be a trap too, or its own free fall into space. So it becomes impossible to tell which is which. This film while dealing with tragic circumstances is so layered, complex, yet somehow simple at the same time. Simple like all the great stories and fairy tales. It transforms pain into beauty, lets you feel it, and then releases you at the end.
All the films he didn’t get to make are missed, but he left us so much. A true artist.
