Three Colours: Blue | |
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French release poster
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Directed by | Krzysztof Kieślowski |
Produced by | Marin Karmitz |
Written by |
Krzysztof Piesiewicz Krzysztof Kieślowski Agnieszka Holland Edward Żebrowski |
Starring |
Juliette Binoche Benoît Régent Emmanuelle Riva Florence Pernel Guillaume De Tonquédec |
Music by | Zbigniew Preisner |
Cinematography | Sławomir Idziak |
Edited by | Jacques Witta |
Production
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Distributed by | MK2 Diffusion (France) Miramax (US) |
Release date
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Running time
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94 minutes |
Country | France Poland Switzerland |
Language | French Polish |
Box office | $10.6 million |
Three Colours: Blue (French: Trois couleurs : Bleu) is a 1993 French drama film directed and co-written by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue is the first of three films that comprise the Three Colours trilogy, themed on the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it is followed by White and Red. According to Kieślowski, the subject of the film is liberty, specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political meaning.
Set in Paris, the film is about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident. Suddenly set free from her familial bonds, she attempts to cut herself off from everything and live in isolation from her former ties, but finds that she can't free herself from human connections.
Blue is among Kieślowski's most celebrated works.
Julie (Juliette Binoche), wife of the famous composer Patrice de Courcy, must cope with the death of her husband and daughter in an automobile accident she herself survives. While recovering in hospital, Julie attempts suicide by overdose, but cannot swallow the pills. After being released from hospital, Julie, who it is suggested wrote (or helped to write) much of her husband's famous pieces, destroys what is left behind of them. Calling Olivier (Benoît Régent), an unmarried collaborator of her husband's who has always admired her, she spends a night with him and says goodbye. Emptying the family house and putting it up for sale, she takes an apartment in Paris without telling anyone, her only memento being a mobile of blue beads that the viewer assumes belonged to her daughter.
Julie disassociates herself from all past memories and distances herself from former friendships, even being no longer recognised by her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. She also reclaims and destroys the unfinished score for her late husband's last commissioned work—a piece celebrating European unity following the end of the Cold War. Snatches of its music, however, haunt her throughout the film.