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Movie Review: On Being Blue

15th Nov 2006, 05:07 GMT

This review contains spoilers, so don't read if you plan on seeing this film -- or go ahead if you want to read it and plan to see the movie anyway -- your choice, of course. Blue begins simply enough – with an ordinary family leaving a busy city, which we assume in this case to be Paris - perhaps driving through the tunnels of the peripherique that circle about Paris as they head out of town and out to the country where their home is. It’s just an ordinary day. Down to the roadside scene when they stop for their daughter, who heads to the tall grass for a bathroom break where we guess she squats and pees. It is during this moment that things turn ominous and we are shown the undercarriage of the car with what must be brake line fluid leaking quickly drop by drop, a bad omen to be sure. A few minutes later, in the hush of the country, the car drives on quickly (maybe too quickly), wheels hugging the road as they head around a bend where the husband, Patrice, must have tried to brake on a sharp curve. Then there is an awful bang, smoke, and a dreadful silence. A young boy in his early teens, who we see before the accident playing with a ball on a stick, goes running through the vacant countryside to the scene of the crash, but there is no village in sight. The scene cuts and what we see next is Julie, the wife, in a hospital bed, badly injured and alone. Her husband is dead as is Anna, her daughter. Whether you like this film or not, it’s hard not to identify with the incredible pain such a loss would bring. To wake up and find that everything you knew is now gone, that you outlived your child (which should never happen) is an awful, awful thing. But this is the stuff of ordinary life – it is how Blue begins and it is not an uncommon story on the eleven o’clock news in any country the world over. People die every day in such crashes, losing half their family and likely wishing they too were dead. I know I would wish that I had died. I would not want to be alive. I just wouldn’t. I could not bear it. As the film will bear out, this is by no means easy for Julie either, but read on. Patrice, we soon discover, was a famous French composer, working on a piece of music for the unification of Europe. It is suggested more than once throughout the film that it is Julie who is the real talent behind the piece and that it was in fact she who wrote the music. Patrice may have taken the glory, but the real talent was Julie. Life is ironic like that. Patrice receives a stately and grand funeral on television, which Julie watches courtesy of Olivier, Patrices’s partner we gather, who brings her a Panasonic foldable mini-television so she can watch. It is makes one ache when she reaches one finger to touch the screen where her daughter’s small coffin is. The world mourns Patrice, but who is mourning for Julie? Who knows that Julie wrote the music and does Julie herself care? It seems for now. anyway, she is content to let it go and has been for a long time. But how much she wrote… well… We never do find out the answer to this question – not with any certainty. It is implied that Julie is the real talent here, that Patrice selfishly took the glory, but it is never stated directly. Like so many French films (and I don’t think this is a bad thing, I think it actually leaves more up to the viewer and helps us draw our own conclusions), the answers all lie in double entendre and in the sub-text. So much is ainsi-dire here. Can one honestly conclude that Julie wrote the music? Yes, if you want my point of view. Does she take the glory? No. Will she ever? It seems doubtful, but perhaps. Perhaps, but not yet. Juliette Binoche plays the role of one who has lost everything extremely well, which is no easy feat, unless you have lost all in real life. To act the role of one who grieves so much must be incredibly difficult and this is where Binoche really shines and in this reviewer's view, is totally underrated – at least in this country. This amount of grief is an almost unrelatable experience unless one has lived it – for how do you know how it would feel, truly feel, to lose everything unless you yourself have been through it? How do you understand that and put yourself in that position? I suppose a talented actor draws on his or her resources as they do… but as for me, there is no way I can imagine it. Binoche, the survivor, is numb, unable to cry, emotionally cold. Expressing emotion would mean losing even more control of her environment, which has already spun out of control, so this is a keen insight on the part of both actress and writer/director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Expressing any emotion at all may, in fact, break her. Her emotion, when expressed at all, comes in controlled, tight bursts; for example, while still in the hospital, she calmly but with terse and controlled anger, throws a chair through a large glass hospital window in order to distract the on-duty nurse so that she can gain access to the pharmacy and the cabinet of pills. Once at the pharmacy, she finds a bottle of pills, attempts to take them all – a full mouthful – but finds she simply does not have it in her to commit suicide and slowly spits the chalky white pills into her hand, just as the nurse is walking into the room, catching her mid-act. The nurse here though, is sympathetic, and who wouldn’t be? I would be. "I wasn’t able to…” she tells the nurse, “…and I broke the window, too,” she says, almost like a child who has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. "Pas grave,” the nurse says. “It’s okay.” Or in other words, “Don’t worry about it,” which is the closest we would come in English to this. This is humanity; this is understanding of great loss. Once well enough and released from the hospital, Julie returns to the rather grand stone estate house (the family was obviously not lacking in money). On staff there is a gardener and a maid. The rooms are large and filled with beautiful objects, but Julie wants everything out, especially out of the “blue room.” She has called ahead of time and asks of the gardener when she arrives, “Did you clear out the blue room as I asked?” "Yes,” he tells her. It is the first room Julie checks (what is significant about this room we don’t really know and it’s not really said). The room is clear save for a blue and clear crystal beaded mobile of sorts that hangs from the ceiling. It catches the light, casting blue and clear light about the blue painted walls. It’s really quite beautiful but Julie tears hard at the fish-wire cord that strings the crystals together until the wire breaks and a handful of crystals fall into her hand. Here again, more of the rage, but with sharp precision – controlled. It is never out of control. No matter how angry she may be, Julie’s rage may even be violent, but it is quick and sharp and sudden and always, always controlled. When the lawyer for the estate arrives, Julie tells him how to parcel out the property. The numbered account is to go to one person (not her). The gardener and maid must be taken care of. The house she does not want (more on this later). And as for her, he asks? She will take money from her own account, she tells him. Of course, there is no way that Julie’s account can in any way match the grandness of what she had with Patrice but perhaps that is precisely the point. She is slowly divesting herself of all things relating to her former life. The house is to be emptied (particularly this ‘blue room’). She does not want the money and the unfinished symphony? Well, even if she did write it, which seems more and more likely, she is intent on destroying all copies of the symphony, visiting storage houses where it is kept in large rolls (and tossing it to garbage trucks). Because there is a blank space where Patrice and Anna used to be – where her family used to be – then Julie will make that space truly resemble the reality of that void. She will take away all outward manifestations that represent any sort of family. Why pretend, after all? So then, the house must go. Any reminders of Anna or Patrice must go. All of it must go. If there is a void – and there is – then it is in Julie and it cannot be filled by anything or anyone else. Julie will not pretty up her pain for anybody. Even herself. When she finds her housekeeper, Maria, crying in the kitchen she asks her, “What’s wrong? Why do you cry?” Maria answers, “Because you are not…” Maybe Maria is right. Like professional mourners at funerals, someone must weep for the loss of the dead. Did you know that you could hire professional mourners? You can. They will weep for you when you cannot, or if there is no one to mourn the passing of someone. Maria may not have been hired to mourn, but like a professional mourner, she mourns because Julie does not. Or rather, Julie does not mourn in any conventional or outward sense that can be understood by the casual onlooker. We understand the obvious and outward signs of mourning -- this is what we have come to accept and expect. So perhaps we would say Julie does not care, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. It is precisely because Julie does care so much that she cannot allow herself to let go of her emotion and truly mourn in some conventional sense. To allow any tears would be to not only accept fully the enormous weight of the loss (which is almost too huge to accept, because it would mean to accept the death of the man who not only loved you, but whom you loved – let alone your child, who no parent should outlive). No, Julie cannot afford to mourn. At least, not yet. For now, to simply survive, to get through the awful days and the reality of what has happened, she has adopted an ice-cold veneer – an ice-cold fucking bitch, you would say – to get by. She keeps divesting herself of anything that means anything or meant anything and this is understandable. It hurts less if you divest -- I think we can all relate to that.. As to her husband Patrice and her love of him, after the furniture is removed from the house, she keeps one mattress which is in front of the downstairs fireplace. She then telephones Patrice’s partner, Olivier (who she must know has a ‘thing’ for her) and asks him to “Come” (the invitation tacit – as I said, this film is full of all that is tacit and again, ainsi-dire, so pay attention). When Julie does telephone Olivier one rainy night after being released from the hospital and clearly recovered, she asks quite simply, “Do you love me?” to which he obviously says yes. "Are you sure?” she asks. She wants to be certain. Note that this conversation is all business. It is cold, direct, and truly lacking in romance. Olivier says yes, he is sure. Then come, she tells him. The implication is clear. He is coming for one reason; he may be coming to ‘make love’, she wants him to come over to ‘fuck’; the two have different agendas here. For Julie, this is merely an attempt to not only disillusion Olivier as we later find out, but to erase Patrice. It is, frankly, a way of fucking him out of her system. She is also, it seems, disrespecting herself. When Olivier does arrive and comes in from the rain, Julie does not greet him, per se, but stands before him in the hallway on the cold, marble floor and although we do not see her, we see her bare shoulders (so we can safely assume she is nude). She simply says, “Take off your clothes.” There is no smile. No seduction, no greeting, not even an attempt at being ‘nice’ (a word I never did like anyway); she is all business. She will get rid of Patrice by fucking him away, or at least, she will try to. This is by no means an erotic scene. She tells him, "They left only the mattress." Here again, as if it is not drummed home by now, if you did not get the heavy hand dropping, then here it is again. After leaving him alone in the house, Julie, clearly upset (one of the few times we see real emotion on her face, tears in her eyes) rushes down the lane by the house and in some effort not to feel whatever is hurting her emotionally, she numbs herself with physical pain, running her knuckles hard against the rough stone brick wall, overgrown with ivy, until her knuckles and hands are red raw. The pain, though – the emotional pain – is still there. Julie soon rents an apartment in the city using her maiden name instead of her married name (another way of divesting herself from her past and her husband – just another edit and rewrite). She keeps divesting, divesting. Soon, none of these things that have been will have any meaning for Julie and it is easier for her this way. Easier to believe that these things never happened, or they did, but they meant much less than they did in reality, because then you didn’t lose as much. Divesting events, people, objects of meaning is a powerful emotional technique. It is a way to try to stop what hurts: it is a way of editing, of rewriting the past to suit our emotional needs such that they do not hurt as much as they would if… The truth is that Julie cannot escape her past any more than the rest of us can. We can divorce ourselves from as much as possible, but this takes time, and she hasn’t had time – not yet. Everywhere she goes she is reminded of her previous life. Even a homeless man with a flute seems to be playing the piece of music that her husband (or she) wrote, and although Julie goes to great pains to destroy it, it turns up everywhere, most notably on television with Olivier later on. Ensconced in her small apartment, Julie finds a mother mouse who has just given birth to a few baby mice. They live in the pantry and for a while, and she seems content to let them live there, almost to relate to them. Meanwhile, she goes through her days blankly, numbly, trying to reconnect, even visiting her mother at a sort of nursing home or rest home. Her mother seems to sometimes recognize her but keeps forgetting or muddling it up. More, her mother is more absorbed in the meta-reality of the television, which is, interestingly and certainly not by accident, showing footage of a man free-falling, tied only at the ankles, as he bungee jumps and flies through empty space on what here appears to be a fine thread. He is fragile, falling, with no soft place to land. It’s all too reflective of Julie’s real situation. This footage is no accident on the director’s part. It’s smart, which is why Blue is a film that so many have disregarded as too arty but if you really see it for what it is, as a portrait of a grieving woman and just that, then it’s really not. It’s smart, it’s clever and well done, with details that are precise and in place. Her mother asks about her husband and child, but then says she already knew they were dead. Whether or not the mother really knew or is making sense is unclear. She does seem confused at times and although Julie is, for once, really trying to connect, it is impossible. The mother’s only real connection is with the bungee jumper on the television set – with the free-falling person, failing to see that the real free-falling person is her own daughter. The one thing Julie does say to her mother - and this is important - is this: “I am scared.” It is the first time she really tells anyone anything of note, and even here, she says it to someone who is not really ‘home.’ Perhaps then it is safe to say it, rather like speaking to yourself. It is as if she is saying it to no one at all. Julie does make one more attempt to visit her mother, but as she approaches, she looks through the window and sees her mother still staring at the television. This time, her mother is watching a man walk a tensile thin wire between two tall buildings – a tightrope walker with his balancing pole. Julie decides not to go in this time. What’s the point after all? Her mother is too absorbed in a reality that is not reality. The tightrope walker, like the bungee jumper before him is also another stand-in for Julie and her experience in the current moment in Blue. Very little in Blue is there by accident. As noted earlier on, the real meaning of this work is subtle and to be found in the subtext. It is spoken without being spoken, or perhaps I should say, it is not shouted. It is as close as we come to sous-silence – a difficult word to translate, but tacitly understood. When she returns home, Julie asks a neighbor if she can borrow his cat. She puts the cat in the pantry, closing the door behind it, leaving it alone then with the mouse and her babies. Of course, we all know the end result of this. The mice will be killed – the mother included. Unlike Julie, a family will be killed, the mother as well. Julie is telling us that this is the way of the world. Life can be cruel and unfair. This is just nature and so be it. Perhaps it is her way of accepting what has happened to her. The problem here is that the cat did not ‘naturally’ find the mouse. Julie manipulated the situation. Yes, afterward she feels badly about it, but it’s too late. She may realize the reasons for what she has done and truly does seem broken up about it. It’s understandable to some extent, but her anger in this act is another demonstration of plain emotion. Again, we mourn and express our grief differently and sometimes in odd ways. Olivier, her husband’s friend and the man she slept with earlier on, does appear on national television saying that he plans to finish the ‘unfinished work’ of Patrice (which Julie does not want). Moreover, and really insult to injury, she discovers that her husband did have a lover. A lover who wants some forgiveness from Julie – a lover who is ‘desperate,’ to use her own word. Statistics here do bear this fact out when they say that the lover is never as good looking, or rarely as attractive as the wife herself. Hands down, Binoche (Julie) is ten times better looking than the lover. She is more subtle, yes. She is not obvious. She is not all long hair and tits and ass. She is beautiful when perhaps her husband recognized this (or clearly he did, perhaps one reasons why he stayed married, the other that she likely had the incredibly talent to write ‘his’ music – a real vampire then who was ‘one of the most ‘important composers of our time’, which Julie sees on television along with photographs of him with his lover – speaking of insult to injury.) Not only was Julie fucked by her husband literally, but figuratively as well. He took her skill, he obviously disrespected her and publicly so, therefore embarrassing his wife even after his death such that he leaves her with a fury that she cannot express to a dead man (how do you manage this?); where do you put that anger? Olivier, Patrice’s partner, says he plans to ‘finish’ the concert for the Unification of Europe, which Julie clearly does not want, but it is almost as if she has no choice at this point. She is tied to the concert at this point, too vested to divest and despite her efforts to destroy it, she cannot succeed. Olivier has outed Patrice’s lover on television during an interview, displaying photographs of Patrice and his lover before a television audience knowing full well that not only will Julie likely see it, but also, in a way, publicly humiliating her and taking away any last connection she may have had to Patrice. Any love that was there Olivier has just taken away, or if not, he has certainly done his best. This is cruel and no doubt self-serving. It not only serves to make Julie more vulnerable and hurt but Olivier knows Julie well enough to know she will confront the issue head on – she will confront the mistress and she does. She heads to the where the mistress works – the courthouse - and seeks her out, the way a hunter seeks his prey. Why does Olivier do this? One can speculate; first, it puts him in a better position with Julie by showing that her marriage was a farce (a cruel thing to do, no doubt – he could have at least left her with a happy memory given how much she has lost); more, Olivier wants Julie all to himself and also wants to finish the symphony, so by outing the lover and saying publicly that he will finish the symphony he accomplishes two goals – he has Julie in the crosshairs. First, she is injured and must now revisit her entire marriage (which will now be seen by her as a sham, sadly) and secondly, the music that is implied over and over again that she herself wrote Olivier is now announcing he will finish – and he cannot really do this without Julie’s help and he knows it. It’s a way then of twisting her arm. He knows she will now not allow him to finish it in some shit way – it’s too important to her. So, Julie is sucked right back in, exactly where Olivier wants her. Olivier couldn’t have set it up better – Julie rings him, he tells her where the lover works (at the courthouse) and Julie goes and waits for her husband’s lover in the rest room to find that the black gowned, white-collared and court-ready attorney is pregnant (and with Patrice’s baby, talk about insult to injury – not only has this woman supplanted any affection Patrice may have felt for his wife, he has also fathered a child with this woman. He has taken all that Julie had -- not just himself anymore, but all she thought she had.) It’s also interesting here to note just how prim and proper and nun-like (a habit) that the lover’s clothes are with the black dress and white collar. Of course, none of this is fair. First, the lover immediately recognizes Julie (how could she not recognize the wife of her lover? Clearly her lover has told her about the wife and she has seen photographs, so this from the start an unfair advantage). But what the lover does know is she will recognize Julie – naturally because she had an affair with her husband – a great and unfair advantage. But aha! Julie has seen the photos on the television and hunted her now dead husband’s lover down, so the score then is even; she recognizes the lover too. It’s an uncomfortable situation for the lover, but not so much for Julie who is again just withholding and cold. No doubt, she feels strong emotion, but it is controlled and tight and frosty. The lover says, I suppose you want to know where and when and how many times, etc. to which Julie says simply “No.” She wears a cross and all black – like a nun. Patrice never knew she was pregnant she says. She says she never wanted a child but it happened. She asks Julie for a cigarette (which Julie gladly offers, of course, and why not -- never mind that she is hugely and obviously pregnant but maybe if I were fucked both literally and metaphorically, I too would be smoking). The lover expects the usual questions; when, where, dates, times, positions, etc. You want to know if he loved me, she asks Julie. Yes. He loved me. She keeps fiddling with her cross and though about six or seven months pregnant from the looks of it, she regardless asks Julie for a cigarette. Maybe this is okay. Who knows, right, or as they would say, Qui sais? Or maybe this too is ironic. Julie just laughs. All the lover now says is this: “You must hate me now…” To say this is to overrate the lover’s importance. Julie by now could care less. She keeps divesting and divesting and yet here is another reason to divest herself of any residual love for Patrice, another reason to not miss him. He loved the lover – another - not her. He fathered another child, not her daughter. In short, he sucks. Why love, mourn, or miss him at all? Is he worth this amount of hurt? And it is precisely because of this Julie feels she has been supplanted in her husband’s affection (when he was alive) that she agrees to meet with the lover again and takes her to the estate where she lived with her husband and daughter and tosses her the key, saying now this is yours. All of it. I don’t want it. The house, the property – just take it. In short, Julie is giving the lover the life she thought she had, and this is important. It is not the life she really had, because as she finds out after Patrice’s death, it is one thing to live a few lies, perhaps the lie that she was the brains behind is music and he took the accolades (which made him a liar already) but that he was more than this, a liar on so many fronts and because of this, their marriage – the house, the family she believed she had, even their love as it was – this too was a sham. So it is then, that all of this should go, in Julie’s view, to it’s ‘rightful owner’ and in doing so, in handing this over, Julie not only lightens her emotional load and baggage in a massive way, but again, she divests, divests, divests – first her marriage, now her love (which she discovers was phony on his part, like the music that was also a sham), her happy family, another sham, the grand estate – just an outward façade – pretty, even beautiful in its way, but ultimately, meaning nothing. All told, there is a void, not only where Patrice and her daughter Anna used to be, but there is a second layer here; the void left after the fact when Julie finds out that so much of what she believed to be true is also taken away. This makes the void all the deeper and all the more unbearable. Not only is she angry at her loss, but she is literally angry (and with reason) at Patrice and has nowhere to place this anger – how do you handle being angry at a person who is dead? Where do you put this anger? As to Julie’s relationship with Olivier it remains ambivalent. She sleeps with him, but it never quite seems like making love. Does she love him? This is not clear. Does he love her? Yes, this is clear. It seems he loved her all along. The first and only time we see Julie cry is after making love with Olivier, and perhaps this is because she realizes after this encounter that nothing can even the score vis a vis Patrice and his philandering and the hurt he has caused and what he has taken and taken and taken, but that no one will ever feel the emptiness she feels, or any of the emotion for that matter. Where do you put all of this grief and how do you fill the void that is left by death and the things you find out after death – that all you thought true was a sham, because one of the central themes of Blue is just that – a sham; the symphony -- which we gather Julie writes -- is Patrice’s sham, his use of his wife. The marriage to Julie is a sham – for Patrice had a lover. So what does that leave Julie with? This seems to be the central question of Blue. Perhaps the answer does lie in the symphony that remains unfinished. Maybe to finish this is the answer. But for now, that Julie mourns in her way, she hates, she loves, she aches, and she goes on living, this is perhaps for her, the greatest tragedy of all.

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