Blue
I gather that the template problem yesterday was widespread. Other bloggers reported the same thing. Whatever it was, it appears to be fixed now.
Saturday night, after I finished editing Sunday morning’s sermon, I watched Blue (1993), directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski and starring Juliette Binoche. It’s the first in Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, based on the three colours of the French flag and the virtues they symbolize (blue-liberté, white-egalité, red-fraternité).
Binoche stars as Julie, and the movie opens with the death of her daughter Anna and her husband Philippe in a car accident. Julie responds to the loss by trying to get rid of all the memories and attachments to the past and starting a new life in Paris. She isolates herself, trying to stay uninvolved in the lives of the others around her. Still, she is unable to stay completely cold. Philippe had been a composer (though there’s been a rumor that it was Julie herself who wrote the music), and Julie is haunted by his (her?) music.
According to the director’s overarching plan, Blue is about liberty, and there is liberty in the film. Julie would like to be free of all attachments, free of all emotions, free of all involvement with others. But as the film progresses, that kind of liberty gives way to love. Kieslowski makes profound use of 1 Cor. 13 as he shows the necessity of the kind of entanglements Julie has tried to escape. As Denis Haack says in his review in Critique, to which you really ought to subscribe, “Kieslowski is reminding an individualistic world that relationship and community are not only essential, but inescapable.”
The story unfolds slowly, with careful attention to detail. At first I had difficulty surrendering to it. There’s very little dialogue — deliberately, I suspect: Julie’s wordlessness reflects her relationshiplessness — and I suppose I also had to get used to the subtitles (the movie is in French).
Now I’m gonna have to watch the remaining two films in the trilogy….