Juliette Binoche makes Julie’s grief painfully credible in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s tightly controlled drama. The music and images sometimes press too hard, but we recommend it for the way a guarded face can hold our attention without explaining itself.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue asks how far Julie can retreat after tragedy before solitude becomes another source of pain. It is a deeply affecting drama, and we recommend it warmly. Juliette Binoche makes the withdrawal convincing: Julie seems determined to limit what others can ask of her, including our own wish to understand her. The film takes her grief seriously enough to allow her to be difficult, and it does not hurry to make her agreeable.
The opening crash frightened us, because Kieślowski makes its violence felt before we have had time to settle into watching. That matters to everything Binoche does afterwards. Her reserve could look merely chilly without the shock that precedes it; with it, the effort involved in keeping people away becomes clear. She gives us enough to follow Julie without making the character easy to read, and Kieślowski is willing to leave that distance between her and us.
Cinematographer Sławomir Idziak makes that distance something we can see. Reflections, blurred focus and dark filters keep changing how clearly Julie can be seen, encouraging us to study Binoche’s face rather than assume we have understood it. The images ask for close attention, and usually repay it. Occasionally we notice the filter before the feeling, and the insistence on making each image significant can make a small human exchange feel more solemn than it needs to be.
Zbigniew Preisner’s music is just as important, and rather less reticent than the performance. It gives force to feelings Julie is trying to contain, sometimes with a weight that seems almost unfair to a woman who wants to be left alone. Editor Jacques Witta’s handling of the musical interruptions lets the film pause without making the grief seem to pause with it. We can hear why Julie cannot simply decide to be free of sorrow. The music lets us hear how much effort her stillness takes.
Claude Lenoir’s production design is restrained enough to keep our attention on Julie, but the world around her can feel too carefully arranged. Kieślowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz give her withdrawal more weight than the lives it shuts out. The supporting characters sometimes seem to exist principally to test her resolve. That is a limitation in a film so concerned with the difficulty of living among other people.
The risk with a drama about grief is that suffering becomes a lesson, with everyone obliged to emerge wiser. Kieślowski avoids the easy reassurance, taking seriously Julie’s wish for individual freedom without pretending that it is simple to achieve. For all the solemnity, there is something bracing about a film that does not keep asking its grieving woman to reassure the rest of us. Binoche keeps Julie’s stubbornness understandable even when her behaviour offers little encouragement to anyone around her.
At 98 minutes, the film leaves room for us to attend to a face or a musical phrase without turning Julie’s suffering into an endurance test. We would not trade Binoche’s reserve for a more demonstrative performance, even when her distance makes the watching difficult. The pauses need as much attention as the music. Choose it for an evening when nobody needs cheering up.
