I am not going to comment on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Bleu in the greater context of Les Trois Couleurs. I prefer to assess one film at a time as a stand alone piece of art and then go back and assemble the trilogy in one longer essay.
Bleu (1993) opens with kaleidoscopic visuals, composed of passing traffic lights seen from the window of a car. As the breathtaking scene unfolds (photographed by Stawomir Idziak) we are introduced to Julie (Juliette Binoche), her husband Patrice and young son. As the car progresses into the French countryside, catastrophe strikes. In a car crash, all are killed but Julie. The remainder of the film will follow Julie as she navigates the effects of grief, attempts to build a new life, and ultimately finds that her husband’s legacy is inescapable.
Krzysztof Kieślowski does not permit his audience to see the crash, it is only heard. This transposes the audience into Julie’s perspective. It seems logical that the event of the crash would have been distorted or partially erased from her conscious. The trauma then becomes as intangible to the viewer as it is to Julie, so that the effects are also equally as mysterious to both parties.
Bleu is marked by a number of long fades to black. These moments recall Julie’s perspective just as the opening crash did. Julie is never out of frame, but for one brief scene, so it seems logical to assume that the narrative is rooted in her perspective. These fades or lapses signify a “blind spot” in Julie’s memory of her husband. She may be purposefully erasing these memories or suffering some kind of neurological trauma. This inability to fill in the gaps, in so far as a shared perspective with the audience, is reflected in the narrative with the introduction of Patrice’s secret past.
Bleu is an examination of the mechanisms of a life shared and a life destroyed, told from the vantage point of the survivor of that destruction. The brilliance of Kieślowski’s film is how much he is able to communicate with the visuals in frame (color, sets, blocking, etc), without relying on an overly talkative script. Binoche is also instrumental to the success of this film. As she did in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (1988), Rendez-Vous (1986) and Lovers On The Bridge (1994) Binoche communicates more with a facial expression or a gesture than most actors manage to say with the best written monologues.
