Three Colors: Blue

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

1993

20 January 2025

See

Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her husband and daughter in a car crash she survives.  At first she’s suicidal, then numb in her devastation. She’s unable to cry and goes through the motions of grief, packing up their country house, avoiding his unfinished composition, running away and beginning again.

Think

She severs her ties with confidant Olivier (Benoît Régent), a friend of hers and her late husbands, who is in love with her. But Julie wants no more attachments, which ses thinks are traps to being hurt again. And yet she goes on living. Julie has inadvertent encounters with a neighbour who she shows up for, and a flutist who plays a recorder on the street near her new apartment and local cafe. She goes to see her mother in a care home, swims laps in a blue pool and tries to handle it. 

Feel

Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight and Underground Railroad described this as the most conceptual of the Three Colors Trilogy. I feel what he means with not just the pool scenes, but of reflected blue on Julie’s face in other scenes as well. She seems so calm and composed but it catches up with her too. We see it in moments where she holds the blue glass beads she took from her family home before leaving. No matter where she runs, or swims to, there it is. Olivier, and her deceased husband Patrice, a celebrated composer, offered her a way through it, though she wasn’t ready to face it at the start. She secretly helped him score his music, and his final unfinished project was a symphony to unite Europe.