News > Movies You Should Have Seen Already: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue

Written by Richard Matthes 

You should have seen Blue already.  It’s a masterpiece, and every day you don’t see it, you’re cheating yourself out of an amazing experience.  In the early 1990s, Kieslowski wrote three movies (Blue, White, and Red) in order to explore the three parts of France’s motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.  The first film, Blue, stars Juliette Binoche—the woman who was Amelie before there was an Amelie—and deals with the concept of Liberty. 

Blue is all about mood, about color (surprising, I know), and about Juliette Binoche, who plays Julie.  The movie begins with a car crash that kills her daughter and her husband, and this event triggers Julie’s natural impulse to pull in on herself, to become isolated and sequestered.  Yet, things have to be done, and houses have to be sold, and wills have to be read.  Every time Julie thinks she’s broken a connection and severed a towrope to human connections, another one springs up to tie itself to her.  Julie’s husband was a composer, and before he died he was working on a symphony for the European Unification.  No matter where she goes, the symphony follows her until, in the end, she realizes that she has to finish what he started.  The symphony leads to her finding out about her husband’s mistress, her starting a relationship with her husband’s friend, and her finally figuring out that her liberty will be different from what she had expected.  

Blue, at its core, is a poem about liberty.  But it is not liberty in the way that we, as Westerners, have come to view the noun, but rather in a grittier, less exemplary way.  “Blue is about, in Kieslowski’s words, ‘the imperfections of human liberty.  How far are we really free?’” (Miles Harvey).  Kieslowski does not paint for the viewer a glorified picture of what human liberty is, but rather a visceral account of whether true liberty is what humanity really desires.  Kieslowski invites the reader into the world of Julie, a beautiful, extremely talented French widow, a woman whose husband and daughter have been ripped away from her in a tragic car accident.  She struggles to rid herself of all connections with her former life, and attempts to prohibit any new connections from being formed.  In all of this, though, Julie finds that she is never truly able to be free from it all, for she becomes connected to people and objects in ways that she neither desired nor sought.  These intimate connections that occur in Julie’s life each defy the different types of freedom Julie is attempting to achieve.  But Blue demonstrates that true, disconnected types of liberty can never be found, and that the only true liberty comes from the realization that humanity is all connected and needs one another. 

For some, this is a trite message.  Human connections is hippie talk.  But through Kieslowski’s lens—and Binoche’s considerable acting skill—the viewer begins to understand why such a thing is undoubtedly true.  Julie, in attempting to free herself from all connections, is looking for a freedom that does not exist.  No man is an island, or so John Donne would tell you, and neither is Juliette Binoche’s character.  Instead of viewing freedom through the lens of “freedom from,” Kieslowski gestures toward the idea that what humans really need is “freedom to.”  The ideal freedom is not the kind that keeps one from acting, but instead the kind  that puts all choices in play. 

See Blue.  You won’t be disappointed.