A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE: THREE COLORS: BLUE, RUBY IN PARADISE
One of the most overused examples of so-called "chick flicks" are when a woman (or women) come up against some kind of crisis, and take some kind of journey in response to, or because of, that crisis. I say overused because often these types of movies indulge in the hoariest cliches associated with "chick flicks." It's true, of course, that movies about men taking journeys can also be cliched, but they're hoary in different ways. Still, there can be good movies made in that genre, and two examples are Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLORS: BLUE and Victor Nunez's RUBY IN PARADISE.
BLUE is the first part of Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy. As with his DECALOGUE films, which explored the Ten Commandments on a personal level, these films take the colors and symbols of the French flag - liberty, equality, and fraternity - and tell stories that explore those slogans on a personal level. BLUE is the tale of liberty, and like the best of the DECALOGUE series, it's a haunting work.
The liberty here comes from an unlikely source - being a widow. That's what happens to Julie (Juliette Binoche) when her husband Patrice (Hugues Quester) and her daughter die in a car crash. Julie, who survived the crash, at first tries to kill herself with pills, and when that doesn't work, she decides to kill off the side of herself that connected with life. She puts her mother in a nursing home. She gives herself to Olivier (Benoit Regent), her husband's best friend, who has long been in love with her. And when Olivier wants to publish her husband's last piece (her husband was a composer), her response is to burn it. She moves to a more lower-class neighborhood in Paris and is determined to cut herself off from everyone. But life has a funny way of reasserting itself. Julie is befriended by Lucille (Charlotte Very), the prostitute who lives in her building, after Julie refuses to sign a petition that would kick Lucille out. The composition Julie thought she had destroyed turns up (a street musician plays it), and Julie is now rumored to be the real author of the work anyway. And Julie also meets up with Sandrine (Florence Pernel), the mistress of her late husband, who may be carrying his child.
All of this smacks of melodrama, and yet there is nothing melodramatic about what Kieslowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz do here. Kieslowski is too interested in the state of mind of grief, and he shows how it truly feels. In some sense, he's able to get at how liberating and yet cruel anonymity can be. To that end, the entire film is shot in a blue motif by Kieslowski and cinematogrpaher Slawomir Idziak. And he's also interested in how we connect, voluntarily and involuntarily (also within his films; Julie Delpy and Zbigniew Zamachowski appear briefly as their characters from WHITE), like Julie hearing a street musician playing Patrice's piece. And while some of this can be maddening at times, it's more emotional and less remote than Kieslowski's previous THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE.
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