*** BLUE
With Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Very, Helene Vincent, Emmanuelle Riva, and Philippe Volter.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Veronique had two heroines and two nationalities, Polish and French, mystically “twinned” by the narrative. Blue is the first part of a Kieslowski trilogy called “Three Colors,” which has already been written and shot in its entirety; part two, White, will soon premiere at the Berlin film festival, and Red is supposed to surface later this year. Just as Kieslowski’s Decalogue proposed ten loosely connected fiction films structured around illustrations of the Ten Commandments, “Three Colors” is devoted to the three colors (blue, white, and red) and three abstract virtues (liberty, equality, and fraternity) associated with the French flag and the French Revolution. In keeping with the three-part idea, however, the trilogy will be set mainly in three countries–France, Poland, and Switzerland–and, like Decalogue, it will have a few characters and settings that overlap. This makes it simultaneously French and non-French–a tactic that has won Kieslowski the scorn of some French critics, who seem somewhat skeptical about this Common Market idealism being paraded under the French flag, especially when France’s position on government subsidies for things like food and the arts differs radically from other European countries’ positions. (The somewhat ersatz Frenchness here suggests the postmodernist Hollywood noir exercises by British and European directors, such as The Grifters and Romeo Is Bleeding, where plots are confusingly neither period nor contemporary but ambiguous conflations of the two.) Thus Kieslowski, in addition to being a master, could also be called something of a cynic and opportunist–not to mention formalist, religious mystic, and black humorist. And as a filmmaker who developed his style in Eastern Europe during a highly repressive period, he might even be regarded as duplicitous.
One final consideration: Most of us know Kieslowski from the time he became internationally famous with Decalogue, a project that can be read as an immediate response to Poland’s Cinema Act of 1987, which withdrew government support from the film industry. Kieslowski got major funding from Polish TV by coming up with the commercially exportable series related to the Ten Commandments, which minimized the more political aspects of everyday life in Poland and concentrated on the characters’ inner lives, borrowing notions about continuity between episodes from soap opera. In exchange for agreeing to make feature-length versions of two of the episodes, he got further backing from Poland’s Tor studio, and bringing in Germans as coproducers gave him access to 35-millimeter film stock. In The Double Life of Veronique and “Three Colors” one can see signs of the same kind of commercial deliberations informing his style as well as his content.
In Blue one has to contend for long stretches with the grandiose notion of an unfinished concerto composed by Julie’s late husband that she initially decides to junk and eventually decides to complete with the help of a friend and lover named Olivier (Benoit Regent). Commissioned, we’re told, by the European Council to be performed simultaneously by a dozen symphony orchestras in the Common Market capitals, this “concerto” (we’re never told for what instruments) is in part a musical setting for a passage from chapter 13 of the first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. In the King James Bible this passage reads in part, “Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” The English subtitles substitute “love” for “charity,” and Kieslowski, in an interview in the French film magazine Positif, insists that “love” and not “charity” is textually accurate, even though the interviewers suggest that “charity” is standard in French. (Is he referring to the Polish New Testament? Or could he have some new multilingual Common Market edition of scriptures in mind?)
