Customer Reviews
Yet more proof that Juliet Binoche is one of the finest actresses of all time - By: Tonkfan, 02 Jun 2008 
Firstly, I think I understand the views of those reviewers who did not like this film, but for me, it exemplifies everything I love about French cinema.
A magnificent film score & poignantly apt camera-work make their mark, but this is Juliet Binoche's film & once again, she effortlessly demonstrates her greatness in every single scene.
This film will not appeal to everyone & it doesn't try to, but it is worth viewing for the music & for the on-going acting masterclass that is Juliet Binoche.
Facing the music - By: cathy earnshaw, 04 Jan 2008 
An awful lot has already been said about this Krzysztof Kieslowski film from 1993 & the Three Colours trilogy of which it makes up the first part. I can only say that I agree with much of the positive reaction & can sympathise with some, but not alll, of the criticisms. It was a mistake, I think, not to address the death of Julie's child in the film: her young daughter dies in the car crash (caused by leaking brake fluid) that killed her husband, but apart from the scene in which Julie hurriedly devours a left-over lollipop, the film focuses almost exclusively on the legacy of the loss of her husband, a famous French composer. I also found the symbolism to be occasionallly too unsubtle: for example, the camera lingers overlong on a feather fluttering as if it were breathing, in quite a placative symbol of life's fragility; the colour blue does tend to be overused, too (through the use of liquid blue filters, the blue beads hanging from the lamp, the clear blue of the swimming pool, etc.). Having said that, some of the symbolism is stunning: when Julie (Juliette Binoche) sits alone in her favourite Parisian café in the aftermath of the horrible event she dips a sugar cube in her espresso (so French!) & the cube is shown slowly darkening - a metaphor for how Julie has been consumed by a trauma which will graduallly colour her whole being; as the sugar sinks & dissolves into the coffee, we realize that Julie has been irrevocably changed by tragedy. Some have complained that the original musical score by Zbigniew Preisner is too bombastic, but I found it brilliantly emotive & well used (the last composition of Julie's husband is a song to celebrate the unification of Europe in a Union - why shouldn't the music be bombastic?).
Binoche comes into her own in the film, partly because Kieslowski was a very compassionate & humanistic director who was able to give her alot of freedom during filming. She says in the interview included in the DVD extras that her performance was personallly inspired by actress Annie Duperey's book The Black Angel, in which she tells of the death of both parents in a car accident ("I suffered enough inside without having to show it as well"). This resembles, & begins to explain, the coldness & initial unsociability of Julie: "I don't want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. They are alll traps." Binoche sensitively shows how she wipes the slate clean after the double deaths & starts - tabula rasa - again, without feelings.
Before Julie begins to grieve, music is a torment for her, freighted with terrible memories of love & lives lost: in the swimming pool, she is shown underwater in a foetal position with her fingers in her ears, trying to block out the deafening reverberations of her husband's music through her psyche. But music is, in the process of grieving, invested with a healing power - the more Julie works on completion of her dead husband's last symphony, the more humane & receptive she becomes. It could be said that music brings her back to feeling itself as well as out of the cocoon-like isolation a little in which she has been living in Paris.
There has been much high talk in the fourteen years since its release that Blue is a dark & morbid film relentlessly crammed with scenes of bereavement & grief, but I would argue that it is ultimately a film about human survival. At the close, Julie is finallly able to cry; as hot tears stream down her cheeks, the faintest of smiles - the hint of a new beginning - can be seen.
Also recommended: The Double Life of Veronique, Three Colours Red, Damage, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Eloquent and elegant - By: Ian Shine, 20 Nov 2007 Blue, the first film in the triptych of Blue-White-Red, is, at heart, about liberty. In fact, it's a meditation on liberty - more than just in the way it dwells on the theme, but in the way the whole film is constructed - & a meditation in an almost literal sense, as the blue filters & props used throughout imbue the film with a sense of tranquility, which overlays the stormy (emotional)waters of the plot.
It's very slowly paced, & speed is another of its themes, for Julie, the protagonist, escapes the countryside to live in busy central Paris, because, according to Kieslowski (in the book Kieslowski on Kieslowski) she is looking to drown in anonymity, to be able to forget her past & live in a 'free' present.
There is a well-know shot where Julie dips a sugar cube in her coffee & watches the cube soak up the coffee. The shot is talked about by Kieslowski on the extras of this DVD, where he tells us about the amount of time & effort that was put into making the shot; finding a cube that would take no longer than five seconds to soak up the coffee. The shot is a metaphor for Julie, who, bereaved of her husband & child, is free to sit & merely soak up the things around her. Like the sugar cube, she doesn't drown in coffee, but merely soaks it up & changes because of it. As such, she is thereby far from free, for she cannot protect herself from the outside world, whether it come along in the form of neighbours, former friends or persistent rumours about the authorship of her husband's music.
I won't say any more about the plot to save ruining it for those who haven't seen it, but simply say that for any fans of art house cinema, this is a must. It is one of the greatest films of alll time in terms of directing, camerawork, acting, scriptwriting, & simply should not be missed. It's one of the most beautiful & fragile films I've ever seen - both of which are reflected in Juliette Binoche, whose character is on screen for almost the entire film, so much is the film about her character - & rewards rewatching.
The colour of grief - By: Four Violets, 06 Apr 2007 First time round, I saw this mainly as a film about a woman's reaction to overwhelming grief when her composer husband & daughter die in a car crash. In the blue swimming pool scene she literallly swims in sorrow. Juliet Binoche, with her very French combination of ethereal & earthy, beautifully portrays the struggle to live alone without any human contact. Slowly, through some surprising revelations & the catharsis of music, she discovers another way of living. Watching the film subsequently I saw links with "Red" & "White", the other films in the trilogy. The old person struggling to push some bottles into a bottle bank, a figure being refused entry at the back of a court room, the people the judge in "Red" is eavesdropping on - the three films are linked by more than the shock ending at the end of "Red". Loss, grief, betrayal & emptiness abound in alll three films but as the tragic widow in "Three Colours Blue" discovers, "no man is an island", however hard he tries.
Awful - By: A. Best, 19 Nov 2006 
Where to start? Generallly this film was beyond pretentious; the whole narrative was indulgently narcassistic, characteristic of the type of film that certain directors & writers crave to make becuase it appeals to their own sense of artistic tosh rather than actuallly interesting the audience.
The problem is large scale tragedy is an alll to easy mechanism to add gravity to a charcter & make the character seem edgy, dark, interesting or whatever adjective people think is worth seeing in a character - its just unimaginative.
The story itself I can barley remember because I couldn't finish watching it. The character is just unbelivable, a total fabrication of a real person & the way a real person would respond to such a life event as Juliette Binoche's character experiences. It's not the acting which is responsible for this (which is average to good) moreover its just the terrible script, screenplay & direction.
