Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Saw Three Colours: Blue (1993), a typically knotty film by Kieslowski, he of the Decalogue fame.  This film series, the colours trilogy deals with the themes symbolized by the three colors of the French flag.  This film, Blue, is related to freedom.

As we have learned recently here in the US, freedom is a tricky thing: there is a "freedom to" and a "freedom from".  This film follows a widow whose husband and child were tragically and suddenly killed.  The widow is very suddenly "free from" and she retreats into this world of unmoored, empty freedom.  She finds herself needing to remake herself, rediscovering who she is outside of her family.  This is not a feminist empowerment film, but a film about loss and how the world has a way of filling the voids in your life.  It is half kind and half cruel.

We see images of life continuing around the widow's island of solitude.  She swims in a pool which is suddenly invaded by many screaming children.  She refuses to participate in a petition and becomes remarkable by not participating.  Even in the retreat, she is running into life again.

And of course there's a whole mess of blue symbolism.  In addition to the swimming pool that she luxuriates in, there's a blue plastic decoration she hangs on to.  Her husband's papers are wrapped in a blue envelope and her daughter's last candy was a blue lollypop.  Frequently there are scenes of her face with glints of blue light playing over it, often when she's resisting human connection.

The film is interesting.  It's not very visceral or exciting, but it sets up little puzzles and slowly and subtly but only rarely pays them off.  This is a film for thinking about and talking about.  It's not obscurantist, so there is a sort of solution layed out in the imdb trivia, but the engine of this film is in its meditation over loss and isolation, which is a freedom of a kind.