(1993; French) As mysterious as music can be expressive beyond words. The 33-year-old wife of one of the world's greatest modern composers, Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), survives the crash of their Alfa 164 into a tree. Her husband Patrice and their five-year-old daughter Anna were killed. Initially suicidal, watching a video feed of the funeral from her hospital bed, Julie recovers.

At home a female journalist, whom Julie refuses an interview, asks in departing if perhaps Julie actually composed the music attributed to her husband, who had been working on a concert for the unification of Europe. Director Krzysztof Kieslowski co-wrote the screenplay for this mysterious symphony of sympathy arising from personal tragedy, the first of his trilogy of colors - blue, white, red.

When Julie asks her housekeeper Marie why she is crying, the older woman replies it is because Julie isn't. The gardener has cleaned out the blue room, from which Julie takes a ceiling lamp with a hanging ornament of blue glass beads (boxing it inside a carton labeled "blanco") for her change of address to an apartment after making arrangements with her lawyer for everything else to be sold.

Her husband's assistant, Olivier (Benoit Regent), responds when she calls him to come over in a rain storm; everything from the house is gone but for a mattress. In the morning she says: "You won't miss me."

She throws away the musical score, with corrections in blue ink, on which her husband had been working. Later she will recognize the tune she hears a street musician playing on his flute outside a café while she has her usual coffee and ice cream for breakfast.

After witnessing from her window three men beating up a fourth and hearing him come up the stairs of her building, banging on doors on his way up, including hers, she goes into the hallway, wearing only a nightshirt, accidentally locking herself out, where she observes a neighbor below letting a man into her apartment; Julie spends the night on the stairwell with a blanket from the husband of a woman who asks for her signature on a petition to evict the loose girl letting men into her rooms. Julie refuses to sign.

A young man, Antoine (Yann Tregouet), who'd witnessed the crash while hitchhiking, brings her the necklace with crucifix he'd found at the scene and asks her about her husband, still alive when Antoine opened the car door, speaking the words: "Now try coughing." Julie lightly laughs, explaining Patrice's repeating the punch line of a joke he'd been telling her just before the crash; she says he can keep the necklace. Several additional allusions to Christ occur, including Julie's age and her rescue of a woman of low repute from wrathful allegations of whoredom.

Finding the flute player lying on the sidewalk, she inquires if he's all right; as she places his flute case under his head, he says: "You have to hold onto something." Olivier finds her at the café. Lucille (Charlotte Very), the young woman downstairs, thanks Julie for not signing the petition; when she calls Julie late at night to come to her at a nightclub where she performs (her father had been in the audience), she expresses appreciation again for Julie's being "good and generous," someone others can count on. On a TV screen she sees herself included in a special about Patrice, along with photographs of her husband with another woman.

She visits her mother, residing in a home for the infirm, who confuses her with someone named Marie-France. She swims alone in an inside blue swimming pool. She borrows a neighbor's cat to deal with a mouse and its babies, of which she's terrified.

When she asks, Olivier tells her of Patrice's affair of several years with a young lawyer from Montparnasse. When Julie finds her husband's mistress, the woman admits as much ("He loved me"), pregnant with his child: "Will you hate me?" (For a brief glimpse inside a courtroom we see the divorce case from White with Karol and Dominique.)

The incidents portrayed from her life appear as difficult parables suffused with greater significance than the obscure particulars. Through her music (adding a flute passage) Julie comprehends or imagines connections and unities invisible, incomprehensible to most people and nations. Hearing her harmonies at the conclusion in the choral passage of the concert may inspire hope in her audience.

(Alfa Romero wants you to know that the dynamics involved in the collision with the tree were entirely fictitious.)

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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