Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

I’ve always been a bit of a “Three Colours” sceptic, despite only having seen this, the first part of it. Just something about the idea of it, I don’t know… cos Kieslowski evidently knew he would retire after making it (as he did, though I don’t think his death just a couple of years later was expected in quite the same way), and so it was obviously designed as a summation and Defining Artistic Statement (capitals used advisedly). Therefore it had to be Big, and Serious, and stuff like that. A rather deliberate and self-conscious monument. And, frankly, I wasn’t convinced, especially after I actually saw Blue; I missed it at the cinema and saw it later on video, but I obviously knew at the time, even when it was brand new, that it came bearing a vast reputation as this sort of epic pinnacle of early-to-mid-90s European Art Cinema. It was French and it was a Trilogy and you had to love it if you were a Serious Film Lover. And I didn’t. It actually rather bored me, and I never did bother with the other two films, although I’m remedying that now. In between times, I did also see L’enfer, directed by Danis Tanovic but written by Kieslowski (who seems to have left behind a number of scripts for other people to film once he’d retired), and I kind of hated that; it gave me the impression of Kieslowski having decided there was a certain formula to European Art Cinema, that there were certain things it should be about and do. This formula evidently included a certain quantity of ponderous self-serious wank, a good deal of which found its way into L’enfer and made me reluctant to explore Kieslowski further.

Still, you know me and my unfortunate tendency to think “I really need to give so-and-so a second chance in case I misjudged them when I was younger”, which is partly what’s driving me now to give the rest of the Three Colours trilogy a chance at last. Which, obviously, meant revisiting Blue first. And, well, it still bored me to tears all these years later. There’s one IMDB review that acknowledges the lead character, Julie, is pretty impenetrable, trying to cut herself off from everything in her grief, and so comes across as hard to like or connect with, but the film’s rather remote approach is actually more respectful of the audience because it’s not trying to manipulate us. I can kind of see what they mean but I don’t buy it; I think that in trying to depict what that IMDB reviewer calls “emotional frigidity”, the film itself just becomes emotionally frigid, and I don’t think there was ever a point at which I actually did give a damn about Julie’s grief. I don’t know, to be honest, if I was even supposed to; I don’t think I ever felt Kieslowski giving me much to work with. And I found the music hideously overbearing, which is a fairly major problem in a film that is, in some part, about that very music. Not an auspicious start to the trilogy for me at least; I’m sure I’ve seen it said somewhere that Blue is actually the comparatively weak link and the other two are better, and, well, I dearly hope that’s the case…

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