"Three Colors: Blue" (1993)

I'm not entirely sure I understand what I saw in Three Colors: Blue but I'm also certain that I wasn't supposed to, and I'm okay with that. The film is about a woman Julie (Juliette Binoche, in a beautifully understated performance) who survives a car accident but loses her husband and daughter in the incident. It's a film that feels impenetrable and abstract at times because the story is exploring Julie's fractured psyche in the aftermath of the incident. She grows erratic, closed off and disconnected. She sells her home and hides away from all people she formally knew. Tiny things happen to her that are never made clear. At one point she befriends a prostitute; she listens to a flute player whose music she finds intoxicating; she goes swimming -- perhaps to feel something; anything. Julie was married to a great composer. It's suggested at one point that she actually wrote his music. It's never revealed whether this is true but she does seem to have knack for music. She hears her husband's old music at every turn; it haunts her mind like old ghosts, coming at her like micro-flashes of lightning. Director Krzystzof Kieslowski shoots the film is a gloomy, mysterious and alluring style -- and, perhaps to be expected, it's bathed in blue tones of every shade and variety. The film doesn't make a fine point about what certain imagery means but some images are so haunting and transcendent that it really doesn't matter; they're hypnotic and seductive and can be appreciated for their own sake. The story has the quality of a symphony; sumptuous, lavish; high emotions and somber low-points. At once, deeply felt and yet distant and hard to pin down. It's an elegant, gorgeous and challenging mood piece.

Grade: A-