Monday, February 24, 2014

I. Trois Couleurs: Bleu

Krzysztof Kieslowski

For quite a long while, I have been putting off these posts on Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. Perhaps this is because they are so dear to me that I hesitate to touch them lest their significance be lost in too ponderous and compact a thought.

Regardless, I have made my disclaimer, and so refuse to accept any blame for the comments that follow. They are meant as a guide, or a jump-start, to contemplation of what must be privileged the name of masterworks.

It is held that these films are themed according to the values of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. And while said values are expressed in these films far better and in far purer a manner than was within the capability of those revolutionaries, themes of human sorrow, love, loneliness, regretted revenge, and great joy are also compellingly portrayed in Kieslowski's characters. As Kieslowski himself stated, "The words [liberté, egalité, fraternité] are French because the money is French. If the money had been of a different nationality we would have titled the films differently, or they might have had a different cultural connotation. But the films would probably have been the same." (Wikipedia)

Just as there may be found the themes mentioned above, there may also be found the traditional elements that make a story in film: plot continuity, character development, appropriate setting and costume.


Yes, there is a story in Bleu. It is the potent tragedy of a female musical genius who loses both the husband she made famous and her young, innocent daughter in an automobile accident.

However, just as the capricious human element forces the film to transcend its presumed themes, the dynamics of music and color accentuate those archetypal human compulsions so that the film transcends a particular plot, a particular character -- while yet retaining the indispensable characteristics of particularity. We are conscious, ever, that we are watchers, that even Julie is a watcher, a voyeur, of her own daily life, a tableau of the cosmic fable of which she too is a part -- the giant, the miniscule at times overwhelming each other, but always interpenetrating.

Bleu is a display of this participation. We are meant to understand that the score is composed by Julie herself. And yet the score plays throughout the film, as if pre-existent, ever-present. It is outside and inside. It is also outside and inside of Julie's ownership. There is a man who plays the recorder in the streets of Paris; he plays her music -- or they play a common music. She asks him how he knows it: "I like to play. I make up lots of things."


Moreover, the cosmic purview of the music -- or the great silence to which it gives birth -- enhances the intensity of every particular emotion, every personal encounter, every knock on the door at night. Even Julie seems aware of its rare effect, and appears at once detached and submerged in the flights and plunges of agonized self-isolation, passionate self-destruction. She seems intuitively aware of the spiritual significance of suffering, in a fashion -- at least aware that it is leading onward to something, and this is why she does not complete her attempted suicide.

Onward and onward to the purge of loss, a heart speared and quivering. And strangely finds peace in the knowledge of her husbands affair.

She is not so indebted, not so deeply bound by ties of identity. The relationship between husband and wife is revealed to be less than she had perceived -- and so she is more of the heroic composer of great music than she had created in her husband -- he detached with the lover, he only a face, a name, she the reality.

In the beginning, after her release from the hospital, she seeks out a colleague who keeps the record of her music, and destroys the only known copy, but in a strange foreshadowing, the music continues.


By chance, Julie catches a glimpse of television, where her husband's colleague (Olivier, who is and has been in love with her) is being interviewed concerning his attempt to finish the incomplete composition. (Another copy has been kept -- "one cannot destroy something so beautiful.")

After the interview, photographs are displayed on the screen of her husband (Patrice) and his lover, of whom she had theretofore been ignorant. In this strange moment of ... grace, if you will, both she and her music are freed in some way -- she from a portion of grief, the music from its limbo of spousal ties beyond the grave. The old is not lost, but a new life can begin -- Julie awakens to a frustration with Olivier for presuming to attempt the fulfillment of so great a work of art freighted with such personal memory. She sets out to stop him, but instead hears him out.

She helps him to understand the beauty, the strain. A new thing is formed. What is broken is renewed, and the human story is woven with a new complexity, hence a new beauty.

"I may speak with every tongue that men and angels use; yet, if I lack charity ..."

I simply insist that you hear the soundtrack. You will live ... better. ... I certainly have. The film is part of the ostentatious Criterion Collection, and therefore may be found on hulu. Alternatively,


:)

Enjoy. Tell me about it.

No comments:

Post a Comment