Some color or another

I've mentioned in the past that there's a segment of the population that thinks of foreign film and immediately thinks "pretentious arthouse stuff". To be fair, there are a fair number of movies out there that would easily give people that impression, one which is not helped by a lot of critics praising such stuff simply for being "not-Hollywood". A good example of a movie that could give non-movie buffs such an impression is Three Colors: Blue.

A car is driving along highways and byways, apparently having recently come from one of Paris' airports on the driver's way to his house somewhere out in the country. We hear fragments of conversation that imply there's a husband, wife, and young child. An adolescent boy is along the side of the road, apparently on the way to school, when suddenly he hears a crash. The car that we saw in the opening has crashed into a tree.

The mother in the car is Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), and she's the only one who survived the crash, although she's in hospital long enough that she misses the funeral of her own husband and daughter. Her husband was a prominent composer who had been commissioned to write a piece of music for the ceremonies marking the change what had been the European Commission to what is today's European Union. But while still in hospital, Julie is approached by a journalist who asks her a couple of intrusive questions, including one about whether the rumors are true that she and not her husband was actually the one to write the music under her husband's name.

Julie at first tries to down a bottle of pills to try to kill herself, but is unable to do so. But that doesn't mean she's OK. She gets back to the country house and tells her lawyer to sell everything, using the proceeds to pay off the house staff as well as pay for the nursing home that her mother (Emmanuelle Riva) is in with dementia. Julie claims she's got a bank account of her own that will be more than enough to live on.

Somehow I doubt that, but that isn't the point of the story. Julie decides that she's going to shut herself off from life, getting a new apartment in Paris under her maiden name so nobody will be able to find her. She also fetches what are, as far as she's aware, the only surviving copies of the piece for the European Union that her husband had been working on, and destroys them!

Life, however, has a way of intruding. Some of the intrusions are new to her. The other tenants in the apartment building where she lives are angry with Lucille (Charlotte Véry), who lives a floor below and works as both a prostitute and an exotic dancer. They need the signatures of everybody else in the building to evice Lucille, but Julie doesn't care, which ultimately leads to a friendship between Lucille and Julie.

But there's more, in the form of her husband's composing colleague Olivier (Benoît Régent), who has some notes on what the EU composition was going to be; Olivier wants Julie's help in completing the composition. Oh, Olivier was also some sort of on-again off-again boyfriend for Julie since they slept together in the country house on Julie's last night there. Her husband also had a mistress of his own, and even knocked her up. It goes on like this.

Part of the problem with Three Colors: Blue is with the story line, which takes a long time to get going. To be fair, however, that's in part because of the subject material, involving a woman trying to shut herself off from the rest of life, which naturally leads to a lot of nothing happening. But where a character study like Wings is well-structured, this one felt like more of a stream of consciousness including any number of scenes that didn't really work for me.

The other big problem is with the cinematography. As with Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers which is extremely red, Three Colors: Blue is, as you can guess, extremely blue, in a way that didn't seem particularly expository but more of an "I'm doing this because I can" statement. I felt the same way about a series of fadeouts that come back to be the exact same point in time. Apparently there's another message here, but it too was lost on me.

But, of course, a lot of critics have praised Three Colors: Blue over the years. It's available on a pricey Criterion Collection set together with the other two films in the trilogy, White and Red, based on the three colors of the French flag and supposedly on the themes in the French motto of "Liberty, equality, and fraternity". I haven't seen the other two movies, so I can't comment on that.