Three Colors: Blue

Three Colors: Blue is a highly acclaimed French film from 1993. The film is about a woman who loses her husband and daughter in a car accident and how she deals with the pain. She initially wanted to kill herself while recovering in the hospital. But she later decides to dissociate herself from anything of her past life. Julie tries to live a new life that is free of grief, love, commitments, and anything resembling a social life. She tries to live a quiet, lonely, solemn life with no one in it.

The theme of this film is liberty. Liberty in this film has a lot to do with emotional freedom. Julie wants to live a life completely alone without any friends or anyone in her life as if she doesn’t exist. The problem with that is people keep entering Julie’s life. She befriends a prostitute that lives downstairs from her, she falls in love with her husband’s friend, and helps her late husband’s mistress who is carrying her late husband’s child. After seeing these people in her life care for her and need her, she has a realization. These people give Julie a reason for living and she is now ready to start a new chapter in her life. In Julie’s search for liberty, she learns lessons from her mother is institutionalized. As her mother represents the liberty Julie is trying to achieve. As the film goes on, Julie reestablishes her connection to her past life and her search for liberty ends.

This film was very well made. The acting and directing was spot on. However, I felt the film was a bit too high brow for my tastes. I felt I was looking at art instead of a movie and therefore I wasn’t that entertained. I appreciate what the director was trying to accomplish but it just didn’t appeal to me. I think the director wanted the audience to pay attention to nearly everything going onscreen for it will all come together in the end. If you miss apart of it, you probably will be lost in the story. Something that bothered me was the classical music that came in and out of the film with strange fade ins and fade outs. I was a little of sick of this ten second piece of classical music that would just come out of nowhere. I liked the story though but felt it was told in a slow, boring way. While it was very artistic, it just didn’t entertain me enough to recommend