The Three Colours: Blue. Krzysztok Kieslowski (Fr; 1993)
Three Colours: Blue Krzysztof Kieslowski (Fr; 1993) Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2nd Feb 2025; ticket: £7.
Kieslowski’s opening montage in ‘Blue’ is a finely honed piece of film making. The first shot, taken from underneath a speeding car, shows the spinning front onside wheel of the car focussing attention on the point of contact between road and tyre. The montage comprising mainly big close-ups has the quality of a classic Eisenstein assembly as it moves between the interior of the car, with its occupants and the exterior as represented by its underside. The contrast between the close up shots of the riders and the actual mechanical contact that carries them, sets up oppositional tensions, between surface and the latent. It also in film terms, where anticipatory tropes are part of montage language, establishes the disaster that is to come.
After the presaged crash, ‘Three Colours: Blue (‘Blue’) ’ simply runs out of road. Kieslowski is unable to unable to develop his script into any thing beyond a chocolate box melodrama, which is enunciated in the shot following the immediate aftermath of the crash in which we see out of the opened rear door of the wrecked car, a child’s ball spill out of the vehicle and bounce gently away. This sentimental staged piece of filmic theatre introduces an immediate false note. It feels like a labourious attempt to re-create the pathos of Lang’s balloon shot in ‘M’ but without Lang’s (and Harbou’s) ability to seamlessly incorporate this kind of signifying symbolism into the flow of their material.
Perhaps I’m on weak ground in writing about Kieslowski because ‘Blue’ is the first and only film of his that I’ve seen. What I know is that most of Kieslowski’s career as a film director was in Poland where he worked under a communist regime that ruled through social oppression and artistic censorship. After Lech Walesa’s rise to prominence, the government became more inconsistent and prevaricative in its enforcement of the rules in the face of prevailing political tensions endemic in the country. Kieslowski like other directors from Eastern Europe may have functioned better as an oppositional creative worker. To have to pit one’s work against constraints delimitations and mono-ideological perversities of a dictatorial regime demands creativity intelligence and resilience on the part of those artists who choose to engage in the subversion of the established and condoned ways of thinking. The purpose of such artists is clear: at some level their work must engage in a critique of the established order, a critique that without overly signing its oppositional nature, points unerringly to the limitations and failure of the ruling regime.
But once the political tide turns and the ideological straightjacket is removed artists can find themselves at a loss as to how to re-activate purpose in and of their work. Andrei Tarkovski exemplifies this. His work was always grounded in a cosmological metaphysics of life and death. But his metaphysical presentation of ‘time as an instability’ for instance always stood out in contrast to the Communist Party’s obligatory adoption and endorsement of the Marxist understanding of time as a progressive historical force. Tarkovski’s idea of ‘time’ was all the clearer for being contrasted with the pure mechanics of ‘time’ represented as a materialist concept. Tarkovski’s last two films, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Sacrifice’ made when he migrated to the West having left the Soviet Union, seem to me the work of a lost man. Tarkovsky in his Russian films allied himself with fools and mad visionaries and by default stood against the system. A system which he understood all too well. But coming to the West, and making his films with a similar psychic alignment but without understanding the destructive forces at work in Capitalism was a different situation. His films become unconvincing metaphysical expositions that come to look like subjective filmic platitudes lost in a vacuum of meaning. Having faced out the tyranny of obligatory collective thought he seemed unprepared when he moved West to see the potential disasters endemic in the unrestrained capitalist individual ethos.
Thinking about Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ I was wondering what purpose lay behind his script. What’s it all about, ‘Blue’? It is apparently the first of a trilogy of films that explores the ‘virtues’ of the French flag: le Tricoleur. These virtues I presume to be the mottos of the French Republic: liberty – equality – fraternity. I have to say that I find it extraordinary in 1993 that this idea, a fantastical ideological construct, could be seen as anything more that a calculated conceit designed to excite the vanity of the French; but guarantee Kieslowski’s films production money from the big French national money pot.
As I understand it Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ perhaps stands for the first of the republic’s virtues: liberty! But what can the notion of ‘Liberty’ stand for in this flag that fluttered proudly over the destruction of vast swathes of Asia Africa and the Caribbean, murdering millions of colonial subjects who simply demanded the freedom not to have to live under this disavowed discredited flag. Perhaps blinded by the glamour and freedom of working in the free West, Kieslowski didn’t feel at liberty to ask this sort of question. He was an individual now.
Even on its own terms ‘Blue’ doesn’t cut the mustard as any sort of representation of any notion of ‘liberty’.
Left alone after a car crash kills her husband and daughter, a wealthy widow (she may have been the actual creative agent behind her husband’s success as a composer) rebuilds her life. She chooses to cut her self off from her previous society and live alone. She has adventures, meets new and different people, but in the end returns to the fold where she learns of her husband’s systematic double life with a mistress, who is about to give birth to his child. The film amounts to little more than shoo through for ‘Juliette Binoche’ who though she walks through the tastefully shot scenery with a certain monopaced aplomb, does little to advance the notion of ‘liberty’.
Of course this may be Kieslowski’s tongue in cheek riposte to the French who were thinking ‘La Gloire de France’ was somehow refracted in ‘The Colour Blue’. In fact the movie they actually paid for was a satirical rejection the notion of ‘Liberty’ simply imbedded in a vehicle that looked like just any other classy French movie of the era. The trouble with this is that although possible, no one seems to have read this type of signification into ‘Blue’.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk