Now I have only one thing left to do:
Nothing. I don’t need any possessions,
I won’t need any memories. Friends or love,
I need none of it. These are all traps…….Why does Julie see life this way?
What had happened to her?
“Will you cough a little?”
…………That was all the poor man said before he died. His last words. He had gone out for a drive with his wife and daughter. He was driving the car himself. Suddenly, thick fog! Losing control, the car crashed into a tree. With tremendous force. Completely mangled!
Only his wife survived. The right rear door of the car had opened, and the child’s toy ball was rolling here and there on the ground. All around, silent fog. His wife had a terrible cough problem—she coughed constantly. So much so that the sound of coughing had become habit for the gentleman. For the last time, he wanted to partake in this ritual. What do we call this?
Love? Or merely habit?
If I had written the script for ‘Three Colors: Blue
(1993)’, I would have crafted the story behind
“Will you cough a little?” like the one above. Krzysztof Kieślowski is far too mature for such approaches. Making scenes speak for themselves—
his mastery in this craft is world-renowned. Let us see some samples of his charisma in this movie.
After her husband Patrice’s death, Julie learns that Patrice had a romantic relationship with a lawyer. Patrice loved the girl,
and she carries Patrice’s child. Neither of them had wanted a child—it was an accident. After Patrice’s death, she learns of it; now she doesn’t want to destroy the fetus. She also learns that when speaking of his wife, Patrice would always say Julie was extraordinary as a human being. Did Patrice love Julie? Or did he merely respect her? When the girl tells Julie, “From now on you’ll hate him and me,” Julie replies,
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to know where we used to sleep?
How many times a month it happened?” “No.”
“Do you want to know if he loved me?”
“Yes, that’s what I want to know.”
“Yes, he did…….” When Julie starts to leave after this, the girl asks again, “Will you hate me from now on?”
Julie says nothing in reply. She leaves. And she signs over the house where she, Patrice, and their child had lived to the girl’s name. Why?
Because she loved her husband? Or because she feels love for her husband’s unborn child?
Patrice was a renowned music composer. After his death, his composer friend Olivier wants to give Julie some of Patrice’s personal photographs. Julie doesn’t want to keep them, saying she doesn’t want to preserve memories. Later they end up with a TV channel. They broadcast them in a talk show. Some intimate photographs of Patrice with that girl were included. When Julie later asks Olivier, she learns about Patrice’s affair from him. Julie then thinks it would have been better if she had taken the photographs when Olivier had wanted to give them to her after Patrice’s death. Then the reporters wouldn’t have gotten them, and she wouldn’t have had to see Patrice’s affair discussed on television. She had destroyed all of her husband’s creations, his unfinished works, saying she didn’t want to keep memories. She had decided to live by bidding farewell to old memories from life, so surely she would have burned the packet of photographs without even opening it, wouldn’t even have looked. And if she hadn’t opened it, she wouldn’t have learned about Patrice’s affair either. That would have been best. Living after losing faith in a dead person, after destroying old love, is very difficult. It only punishes oneself.
An empty bottle on a restaurant table. The bottle’s mouth is open. A spoon is inserted there. It’s moving,
the lower part hitting against the inside of the bottle, making sounds, and Julie’s face is visible reflected in the back of the spoon. Julie sits alone at the table. A beautiful visualization of solitude!
Another one. After her husband’s death, Julie finds a lollipop in her bag. It was given by Patrice. The scene of her chewing and eating it with intense emotion and despair is worth treasuring in memory! In another scene, after Patrice’s death, the housekeeper weeps, and Julie asks her, “Why are you crying?”
The answer comes:
“Because you’re not.” The dialogues in this movie strike the mind quite forcefully!
During the accident, a boy was sitting a little distance away. When they were taken to the hospital,
the boy found a necklace. Later he comes to return the necklace to Julie. He was the only witness to the accident and its aftermath. The boy asks Julie,
“Do you want to know anything?” “No,”
she says and gives the necklace to the boy. Julie doesn’t want to live keeping any memories or traces of the past.
Another scene. Julie has ordered coffee and ice cream at a restaurant. She pours the hot coffee into the wide glass of ice cream. The ice cream is melting. Julie lifts the ice cream with a spoon and eats it. A failed yet sincere attempt to mix some warmth into life’s coldness. Outside, a man is playing flute. Such beautiful melody. Julie looks that way, listens to the flute, reads the man. On the table, the shadow of the coffee cup, a few drops of coffee staining the saucer, the spoon lying beside the cup. Ice cream melting in the coffee, emptiness slowly receding in the enchantment of melody, bit by bit.
What is love really to a man? Physical attraction? Olivier says he loves Julie. He wants to have her. To a man,
having a woman means obtaining her body, not her mind. The yearning to obtain that,
men have named it love. This is how Julie thinks. One day she fulfills Olivier’s desire. Julie is like any other woman, nothing special. Her body sweats,
she has a cough. Her naked body has many marks. There’s nothing about her worth missing so much. The intoxication of the body has worn off; surely Olivier has no more desires now. This is why he kept saying all along that he loved Julie. In exchange for this trivial body, Julie freed herself from this lie. What next? As she leaves the house and walks away, she rubs her fist and fingers against an uneven, rough wall for a long distance, bloodying them. What a wonderful expression of remorse!
In one scene, Julie sits in a café. She holds a sugar cube. The cube absorbs the coffee in 5
seconds. What did the director think about this scene? Let’s hear it from his own mouth:
The matter is simple. We wanted to show how the heroine is absorbing the world around her into herself………She is no longer interested in the outside world. What others are doing, about this, even about the man who loves her, she has no interest. After much searching, today she has found herself. She has no headache about anything. All her attention is focused only on that sugar cube.
Three Colors:
Blue. The next two colors in this film trilogy are White and Red. In one shot of the movie, we see
Julie holding a box
with ‘Blanco’ written on it, a Spanish word
meaning
‘white’. Next shot. Julie is seen from behind. She stops briefly in the middle of the road; to her left, a man in blue clothes walks by, to her right, a woman in red clothes walks by. In another scene, we see children in white and red swimwear jumping into the swimming pool. These three colors are on France’s flag. Blue is the symbol of liberty, white of equality, and red of fraternity. The first of the trilogy is the most popular.
Julie wanted to live by erasing her past. Not with tears, but with courage of the heart. Whatever was connected to the memories of her husband and daughter, she kept herself away from all of it. The house, the furniture in that house,
other belongings,
even her composer husband’s musical compositions—everything. She herself moved to another room. The use of blue color in the cinema is aesthetic. The color of Julie’s clothes is blue, in the photograph of Patrice with his lover, blue clothes as well. The lollipop in the daughter’s hand at the beginning and later the lollipop found in the bag, both are blue. What she keeps after selling everything else,
that chandelier is blue,
blue lights in the swimming pool too. Throughout the cinema was the careful use of blue shades. In one word, the color of Julie’s existence is blue. That blue mixes melancholy and liberation. After the death of her husband and daughter, pushing away all sorrow and memories, Julie repeatedly wanted to keep herself free. She lived alone, freed from family bonds,
walked life’s path alone. But is solitude really the final word of Julie’s psychology?
Watching the movie, it doesn’t seem so. Though she has no family, she has wrapped herself in the shadow of people. She runs to her mother and Olivier under various pretexts of work or simply to chase away loneliness. No matter how much one says verbally that they will keep themselves free from all bonds including friendship, job, love,
family—how much of this is actually possible?
Did Julie manage to do this in the end?
In this cinema, in four scenes, all colors disappear from the screen, only black comes. Why?
During those times, music plays in the background, capturing the emotions of those moments. Julie makes all the colors of her past life disappear through black, living only with the present. Julie wanted to destroy all of her dead husband’s creations, yet repeatedly felt Patrice’s compositions within herself. She would keep herself submerged in the swimming pool water for long periods, almost killing herself, but when she surfaced,
she sensed the existence of old melodies in her head,
melodies created by her dead husband. Standing beside the piano or when melodies come to her subconscious mind, she indeed sees herself floating in the stream of music. The constant desire to live without keeping memories, desires,
work, or any expectations
ultimately surrenders to love.
Though ‘Three Colors:
Blue’ is part of a trilogy,
its story doesn’t depend on the stories of the other two. The film is the story of a woman’s survival after the sudden death of her husband and
only child, the story of swallowing sorrow and seeking liberation. Life doesn’t stop for anyone,
no matter how much one tries,
life never follows any fixed rules—life continues by its own laws.