Three Colours: Blue
Retreating too far from The Index
In Three Colours: Blue, Krzysztof Kieslowski could be accused of over-directing, as a writer might be accused of overwriting. In literature, we have the term purple prose, but cinema doesn’t quite have the equivalent phrase. But if it did, Kieslowski might be a good example of purple direction. This doesn’t make the film bad, but it can make it seem too categorical. Here are a couple of examples. When grieving central character Julie (Juliette Binoche) meets the young man who witnessed the car crash that she survived and which killed her husband and daughter, the first moment of the scene shows a cross in an immense close-up entering the frame as he hands over a chain which he found at the accident. In another scene, Julie destroys the score we hear non-diegetically on the soundtrack. When she throws it in the garbage truck, and it gets eaten up by the lorry’s claws, the sound becomes diegetic and the score muffled and distorted, as it gets churned up by the machine. Kieslowski started his career as a filmmaker in communist Poland, making documentaries, and in the early 1990s made a trilogy of films (including Blue) recognising the presence of a new Europe as a more integrated region that is reflected in Three: Colours Blue through the score we see chewed up: it was a composition the husband was working on when he died, and which was celebrating a unified Europe.
If early documentaries like First Love focused on small subjects, as a couple is soon to have a baby, and films in a style commensurate with the size of the story, as the film follows Direct Cinema tenets of long take observation, Three Colours: Blue is a panoply of techniques. One way of looking at this semiotically would be to say that First Love is chiefly denotative; Three Colours: Blue frequently emphasises the connotative. Put another way, First Love is meaningful; Three Colours Blue is Meaningful. This can seem like praise for the former while denigrating the latter, but many great films have emphasised the connotative function and left us wondering about the purpose of the work, as they retreat from telling their story to musing over the form. When Godard’s camera circles the farmyard in Weekend and disorients us in the screen space, or Antonioni focuses on the men fighting in some waste ground in La Notte, we might muse over the purpose of the images as the camera movement becomes pronounced, or the apparent purpose of the story seems to retreat. From a certain perspective, any deviation from the narrative, any play with the form, will convey the connotative, and potentially be seen as purple cinema.
However, while we believe Godard and Antonioni are far from purple, Kieslowski in Three Colours: Blue might, in the examples we have given, pass for an exemplary instance of it. Yet we can be wary of the filmmaking, without completely undermining what in many ways remains an impressive work. Though part of a vaguely interconnected trilogy with Three Colours: White and Three Colours; Red (and where characters from each appear in the other works usually in passing), Blue works very much as a stand-alone piece on grief and creativity, of letting go of one’s worldly goods, and finally accepting the interconnectedness of things as Julie sees that life must go on and she can be a catalyst by changing elements within it. This takes chiefly two forms, the familial and the artistic. After she finds out that her late husband had a lover, and is pregnant, she accepts them into the house that the husband’s family owned, and that she was due to sell. She also helps complete that musical score her husband was working on (and she was almost certainly responsible for), with a colleague of her husband’s, Olivier (Benoit Regent), who has always been infatuated by Julie, and with whom she may start a relationship.
This makes the story sound neater than it is, and Kieslowski’s problem wasn’t that he was a simplistic filmmaker, more that in his last works he seemed to want a visual complexity to match his ethical and affective conundrums, and to match the element of chance that turns a life into a continuum or a catastrophe, a predictable existence or an existential crisis. In Blind Chance, various scenarios are worked through showing how much chance plays in our lives, but also how out of chance there comes a certain causality. Chance may create a change of direction in one’s life, but then this generates a series of consequences that can seem to produce expected outcomes. In Three Colours: Red, the judge, who has retired and retreated from society, and is now in old age, relates to a young woman he has become besotted with why he did so: he condemned a man who may have been guilty but was also the lover of his late wife, who by chance came under his legal jurisdiction. The chance scenario led to many decisions he has made since. In Three Colours Blue, this notion of contingency is played out at the film’s beginning, and Kieslowski insists on creating portent within the portentous, with Hitchcock meeting Robert Bresson, meeting Antonioni, meeting Fritz Lang. The Hitchcock moment comes when we see that the brakes are leaking fluid, giving us information to which the characters are not privy; the Antonionian-esque, in the fog all but obliterating the car except its headlights, the Bressonian as it offers a partial view of the crash as we hear the noise of the car crashing into the tree, but don’t see it. (We only see the damage afterwards.) The Lang touch lies in the daughter’s beach ball rolling out of the car in an echo of the ball in Lang’s M. But what makes it Kieslowskian is this idea of contingency, played up when the film crosscuts between the car before it collides with the tree, and the boy who will later return the necklace playing a game with a small and grooved stick as he tries to get the ball that is attached to a string to fit into the groove. He keeps failing, but the moment he succeeds is the same moment that the crash takes place. A minor bit of good luck meets with an enormous amount of misfortune.
Yet if chance has often been a central theme in Kieslowski’s oeuvre, so also have been the ethical consequences. As we have noted in Three Colours: Red, the judge retires and retreats after sentencing his wife’s lover. In Three Colours: Blue, Julie retires and retreats as well. She takes an apartment on Rue Mouffetard without telling anyone, and when someone asks what she does for a living, she says nothing at all. Julie may be an innocent while the judge might see himself as a guilty man (exacerbated by the technical equipment he has set up to record the sounds of his neighbours as he plays God), but they both try to make sense of a world that isn’t making sense to them.
Kieslowski’s work at its best often shows the difficulty of trying to act ethically within a universe that could be godful or godless, but where the individual is at the mercy of forces they cannot quite understand, yet must live as if their lives at the same time aren’t meaningless. Yet it is the balance between accepting one’s inability to make sense of the world and the determined attempt to live as if it does, that allows for the tension in his work, and the dignity of a human to live. Push too far into controlling it, and life can prove cruel, as one finds in the first film in the director’s Decalogue project. A man who trusts maths, works out the ice on a lake will be thick enough to skate on, only to find his calculations don’t match with reality, and his son and others drown in cold, cold water after the ice breaks. It wouldn’t be correct to say this is Kieslowski undermining science, but he might well be asking for greater modesty in the context of prediction, as Science’s predictive brilliance needs to accept its limitations, and the desire to see the future through calculation can sometimes prove disastrous as the central character loses his child.
In Three Colours: Blue, there is no such hubris, but it is understandable that Julie wants to live without responsibilities or attachments, as she tries to insulate herself from further pain. Yet her husband’s death is itself a responsibility, and she has to make decisions over the house, the gardener and the cook they employed, the score he hadn’t yet completed, and the child that she feels partially obliged towards, even though it happens to be her husband’s and his lover’s. When she meets the lover, the woman says to Julie that her husband said she was good and generous, and people could always count on her. Julie may believe that she can retreat and retire, but that is not who she is, and grief hasn’t quite changed her personality. It has only temporarily hardened it. The film proposes that the force of chance needn’t deform personality, and by the end of the film Julie becomes once again the person who others can rely upon, a detail hinted at much earlier in the film while Julie has only recently taken the apartment, and a neighbour comes and tells her that she needs her signature to evict someone from one of the other flats. She is using it for sex work, the neighbour proposes. Julie says this is none of her business. It can seem like she simply doesn’t want to get involved; signing the petition would be returning to a form of social life. But shortly afterwards, when the sex worker thanks her, they become friends.
The film explores Julie’s shift from acting out of character, after a contingent situation, to returning to character by the film’s conclusion. Unlike the judge in Three Colours: Red, who becomes reclusive for years, and unlike the Decalogue episode, where the film doesn’t follow up on the consequences of the boy’s death, Three Colours: Blue is a character study, an exploration of a personality returning to itself. It is partly why the film is visually and acoustically so bombastic, as though determined to find in the world correlations to Julie’s pain. When, on several occasions, the film shows her going for a swim, she has the pool to herself. This isn’t a private piscine, but Pontoise in the 5th arrondissement, a busy pool in the centre of Paris. Julie may have the money to hire the baths for herself, but nothing suggests she does, and while Julie swimming makes sense, keeping her body healthy while trying to keep dark thoughts away, one may believe that Kieslowski just found it a great location to pursue his blue visual palette. Others in the pool would have diluted it, and better still, he films at night, all the better to bring out the blueness of the locale.
Someone might say that we are being too literal, and why should anyone care that Julie has a usually busy swimming pool to herself? But our claim is that Kieslowski risks being too categorical. While he understandably wants to show us a woman for whom the world becomes a place infused with the grief she feels, it risks solipsism in aesthetic form by showing those around her as little more than extensions of her subjectivity. When Julie watches a frail, bent elderly woman putting a bottle into a bank (an image running through the Trilogy), it doesn’t feel like we are experiencing the woman’s suffering, but that she serves simply as a reflection of Julie’s. There is an enormous difference between Three Colours: Blue and Amelie, but both can be viewed as films taking from Paris what they need for their tonal throughline, and thus turning the city into a colour scheme that reflects the characters’ preoccupations. This might be all very well for Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose work has always been contained by the limitations of a quirky artificiality (in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children), but Kieslowski was an admirer of Ken Loach, ‘‘and is quoted as saying he would happily have made tea for him on set, not to be an assistant but to see how he works. In [Kieslowski’s] Camera Buff, the protagonist, an amateur filmmaker, is flicking through a book on filmmakers and arrives at a section on Ken Loach.’’ (Kamera).
This isn’t to say that a filmmaker who adopts a realist position earlier in their career shouldn’t use a more stylised one later. But we can acknowledge that the observational acuity he admired in Ken Loach becomes in Kieslowski's later films (the Trilogy and the film he made before it, The Double Life of Veronique) rhetorical virtuosity, a stylistic style that risks the tautological. An extreme example of this rhetorical virtuosity is in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, as the camera circles the room and mimics the tape spools while the character listens to them. If the camera were to circle the room and show us images of the people who happen to be on the tapes, that circular motion would have earned its movement, but De Palma adopts it as a clever gimmick, a rhetorical cinematic flourish without any diegetic purpose. We might believe this to be so with the score losing its sound as it gets eaten by the teeth of the garbage truck. Both moments show us what a skilful director can do, but don’t quite illustrate a point that can serve beyond the virtuosity. We could say the same about the cross and chain so blatantly entering the frame, though it might be unfair to include Julie swimming in the pool, or other examples of virtuosity, including a shot of the doctor viewed from literally Julie’s eye as we see him reflected in her orb, or the music heard non-diegetically as Julie and Olivier work again on the musical composition.
We may believe the change of style reflects expanded thematic preoccupation, over the sort of budgetary freedom that leads filmmakers to push perspective (a popular term in the 1990s to describe directors trying to put their talent on the screen). If so, then we can see how in films Blue, Red and The Double Life of Veronique, the ethical interests of the early work led to a fascination with the theological questions offered in the Decalogue (based on the 10 Commandments), which in turn led to the spiritual, even supernatural elements of his last films. If the style in Blue, for example, can seem artificial, another way of putting it is to see the predominance of blue, the empty swimming pool, the wide-angle lenses and the magnifying close ups all contributing to Kieslowski’s attempt to convey the metaphysical within the physical, to see film as not only a realist medium, but one that can extract from what semioticians call the indexical (as opposed to the iconic and the symbolic), the real that would seem cinema’s natural ‘sign’. When C. S. Peirce differentiated the three aspects, he insisted that the symbol was abstraction, iconicity was likeness, and the index was concreteness: something that had a direct relationship with reality, like a footprint or a thermometer. Film has that relationship, but it can, of course, also absorb likeness and abstraction, and, while existentially founded on the index, is constantly reliant on the icon, yet also draws frequently on the symbolic.
A realist aesthetic emphasises the index and accepts the iconic as an aspect of representational realism. If the difference between a celluloid film and a painting lies in the difference between a recording (index) and a representation (painting), that works on the level of how something is made, but it needn’t alter very much how a work is seen, as now most films aren’t produced with the chemical process that was central to defining cinema as an indexical form, but using a digital one. Yet most viewers will be immediately able to tell the difference. But to absorb the symbolic into a film might seem to take it too far from its indexical status, and this is one way of describing the shift from Kieslowski’s early documentary work to his later films. Those in between (like Camera Buff and Blind Chance, and the Decalogue) lean towards the indexical awareness of film as a recorded medium; the late films on cinema as a malleable form that can draw strongly from the symbolic. Norman Holland says, ‘‘Why the blue pendant lamp? Why the street brawl? Why the old woman and the green recycle bin? Why the boy Antoine, first on the scene of the crash? Why the joke about the laxative? Why the sugar cube? Why the man playing a recorder? Why the swimming pool? Why include Julie’s mother and her odd taste in television programs, the elderly bungee jumper? [...] There are dozens of these incidentals. Why are they there?’’ Holland adds that ‘‘It seems patronizing to say it, but remember—despite the powerful illusion that we are seeing a photographed reality—that everything we see in a movie was chosen.’’ (A Sharper Focus) These choices can indeed seem symbolic.
Most of the time, in cinema, these choices become integrated enough in the diegesis for the viewer to feel under no obligation to understand them, and usually because the film itself comprehends them for us. When the camera drifts away from a street sign and looks through a window, we know why it is doing so when we see a dead body lying inside a house (I Confess). But if that camera drifted arbitrarily with no ‘reason’ to do so, the viewer would become aware of the camera because we don’t know why it is moving. When De Palma offers the 360-degree shot in Blow Out, it can seem like pointless showing off because it doesn’t give us any new information, though it does echo the spools and makes us aware of the camera without leaving us baffled. A virtuoso shot used as a gimmick can do exactly that.
However, if we wish to defend Kieslowski against such accusations (while acknowledging that he occasionally falls into meretricious virtuosity), it rests on his interest in trying to find a metaphysical correlation, to find a style for the story that can go beyond its ready narrative boundaries, all the better to suggest our world is greater than our ready understanding of it. How can the homeless recorder player perform the musical piece that hasn’t been completed or made public? Why does Kieslowski cut away to the elderly lady, or show Julie watching a street fight? The latter would usually indicate fear; that she is living in a rough and tough neighbourhood. But it doesn’t get much more salubrious than the Rue Mouffetard, with its elegant cafes and art house cinemas, and nothing more is made of this confrontation on the street, beyond the detail that she locks herself out when the person escaping enters the stairwell, and she tentatively investigates
What the elderly woman, the homeless man and the person being beaten up all represent is fragility, and while Julie escapes from the world, perhaps in an attempt to protect herself from further pain, her reclusive, unemployed self has time to witness it in others as the busy pre-mourning self Julie might not have. Her grieving state gives Kieslowski the opportunity to witness suffering through Julie, and yet we might resist suffering so aestheticised. When Susan Sontag says, ‘‘Images have been reproached for being a way of watching. But watching up close – without the mediation of an image – is still just watching’’ (Regarding the Pain of Others), the mediation nevertheless can create false or exaggerated emotion. While that direct relationship with another’s pain might be compassionate or indifferent, it is one’s own. Kieslowski films it with a pathos that seems to contain its own contradiction. The director’s style is luxurious, while the suffering is not, and at the same time, it doesn’t quite seem a correlative of Julie’s wealth and privilege, even if this is close to the film’s theme. Simone Weil once proposed that ‘‘the recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.’’ (Gravity and Grace) If Julie can now witness suffering she might previously have missed, it rests on her retreat from wealth without herself becoming poor, and the grief she feels opens up a space regarding the pain of others. This would seem to be Kieslowski’s problematic, but we might then believe that he offers it in too pompous a form, and that his retreat from the literal is all very well, yet not if he falls into the overly categorical as a consequence. When a narratively-oriented filmmaker cuts to a close up of a knife or a gun, it becomes an obvious but useful way to convey information, but when a filmmaker, retreating from narrative, wants us to understand the complexity of feeling and offers shots that can seem equally categorical in their representation, even if they might remain ambiguous in their meaning, it can seem overstated. It can get in the way of the very compassion the filmmaker seeks by insisting on an emotion that appears too packaged.
Kieslowski might believe the film’s style is important and brings out the metaphysical nature of his enterprise, and views Julie less as a character going through grief, as a representative of a grieving state that registers the pain of being human. It would be churlish to denigrate a filmmaker who has worked so hard to create a vision of Paris that is contained by an idea greater than the immediacy of realism, and why we have talked of the escape from ready indexicality. However, retreating from the real can sometimes be a lunge into the false, and one scene here might exemplify the film at its worst, even if there are many that would exemplify it at its best. It comes when Julie strides through the house she intends to sell and hears crying in the kitchen, and finds the cook in the pantry sobbing. Julie asks Marie why she is crying, and Marie replies that it is because Julie isn’t. It reduces the woman to a one-dimensional expression of another’s grief, and such moments risk turning the film into an oblivious account of the rich, where the poor are extras expressing the sadness of the wealthy who are too dignified to shed tears. Julie gets her grieving moment in blue filters and Zbigniew Preisner bursting on the soundtrack. Between the tears of the cook and the filtered image of Julie sitting in a chair, there are others that show Kieslowski as the important filmmaker he had become. Yet one could do worse than use late Kieslowski as a key instance of purple cinematic prose, as he receded a little too far from film’s indexical roots
© Tony McKibbin