Text/Volume Sister
To be free means to endure loneliness and fear. So would you rather fall into free exile, or a captivity of love?
"Blue, White and Red Trilogy" is the masterpiece of the talented French director Kieslowski. Blue, white and red are not only the colors of the French flag, but also a symbol of European culture, representing freedom, equality and fraternity. Blue is the first chapter of the trilogy and the first time I saw Kieslowski's work. He was a late-blooming but untimely film artist and a writer-director with a significant personal style. But frankly, his films are not easy to understand.
Although the plot of "Blue" is not complicated: the heroine loses her musician husband and young daughter in a car accident. She was devastated and tried to forget the past, but she could not get rid of the cage of memories. By chance, she discovers that her husband has a mistress and that the other is pregnant. In the process of pursuing the truth, she finally really let go of the past and accepted the pursuit of the assistant.
However, the appearance of a large number of images in the film, the repeated use of the fading picture, the frequent appearance of montages, and the deliberate weakening and crushing of the plot make the viewer more confused when watching the movie, unable to understand the real intention of the director, and miss the pleasure of appreciating the beauty of the film.
Today I will interpret the theme presentation method and intention of the film, and analyze the film to explore Kieslowski's film style and creative consciousness. I hope to bring a new perspective to many movie lovers.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >1, Theme Presentation: Double clues spiral winding, composing variations of life and death</h1>
This film has two clues through, if you can look at the film from a clue perspective, you can understand the logic behind many of the heroine's actions.
The first thread is about freedom and captivity. The theme of this film is indisputablely freedom, but the back of freedom is often captivity. In Kieslowski's proposition, positive and negative are never opposites, and any kind of freedom is at the same time a captivity, and any kind of imprisonment also means the enjoyment of freedom. While the heroine is free, she also quickly falls into some kind of captivity.
Gain social freedom and fall into the cage of memories:
The car accident at the beginning of the movie makes the heroine lose her husband and daughter, and also lose the dual identities of wife and mother. This means that she has complete freedom from social responsibility and does not have to bear any responsibilities and obligations. But at the same time, the memories of the good life of the past, the unrelenting feelings for her husband and daughter, these two things, like two shackles, imprisoned her in the memory. Such freedom is too cruel and too costly, and the heroine is like a walking dead, only seeking early liberation.
Liberation from spiritual freedom and relapse into the cage of love:
She committed suicide by swallowing pills, having sex with her assistant, and selling her former home, all of which she did just to get out of the cage of the past. The tears that finally fell in the blue light at the end of the film are the tears that I saw her for the first time in this film. Tears sometimes represent sadness, but in the face of great pain, it represents liberation. We also know that Julie finally came out of her grief, accepted the assistant who loved her, and could continue to live her own life. At the end of the film, I can't help but have another layer of thinking, is Julie, who has regained her love, fallen into another kind of captivity? Enjoying freedom means suffering from loneliness and fear at the same time. So what kind of prison is love? Or is it a freedom?
The second thread is avoidance and attachment. The contradictions of escape and attachment are all evident in Julie, running through the details of this film.
The sudden destructiveness of the blue chandelier in her home represents her inner fear of the past memories, which seem to be submerged and devoured by the tide, and only by smashing the lamp in front of her can she stop. Later in the plot, Julie takes the blue light to the newly rented apartment and solemnly hangs it in the living room. The contradiction of the character's behavior here shows her escape and attachment to past memories, and several internal struggles.
The same contradiction erupted in the scene of waking up after a car accident. Hearing the news that her husband and daughter were dead, Julie took a big mouthful of sleeping pills into her mouth, but it was difficult to swallow and spit it out, and she could only say to the nurse she bumped into: "I can't, I can't do it." On the one hand, she wanted to escape the desperate life of her husband and daughter who had died alone, but on the other hand, the instinct to survive made her stop committing suicide. Similar contradictions include the hunting of female rats and the gift of lovers. And this also shows the fragility and struggle of Julie's soul after experiencing the loss of the world.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >2, a large number of images are stacked out, and blue is the biggest image and color tone of the film</h1>
blue:
As the heaviest image of this film, "blue" is almost all over the film and everywhere. Blue is not only the lighting and color tone of this film, but also a very important visual image. Blue, like the concrete image of the cage of memory, always comes suddenly when Julie falls into memory, accompanied by the sonorous sound of the symphony made by her husband before she died. There is an impressive scene where the blue almost drowns Julie in the picture like a tidal wave. Suffering from pain, Julie calls Oliver to make love, but the brief pleasure is difficult to fill the huge hole in her heart. A swirling blue light wandered across Julie's face, and she looked like a beast roaring in pain.
swimming pool:
The blue pool resembles a matrix and takes on the role of a post-traumatic healing effect for Julie. Julie's swimming in the pool has four scenes. The first time was after being discharged from the hospital and hearing a street entertainer playing the music of her husband. The second time was to meet the boy who witnessed the scene of the car accident and learn from him that the last thing her husband said before he died was a joke he told her. The third time was to release the cat to kill a litter of mice and female rats in the house. The last time was after meeting the mistress. Julie immersed herself in blue water for a moment of redemption.
Blue Lollipop:
The blue lollipop represents memories of the little daughter. It first appears in the opening scene, with her daughter holding up a blue sugar paper in her hand and rattling with the wind outside the car window. When it came again, it was Julie who flipped a blue lollipop in her bag. She chewed slowly from the beginning to the back almost frantically tearing. In an interview with Juliet, the French actress Juliet, she said that her understanding of the character's behavior at this moment is that Julie is using her teeth to break the iron fence of the cage.
5 second sugar cubes
I call it a 5-second sugar cube because Julie dips a corner of the snow-white sugar cube into the coffee until it is fully penetrated, for a total of 5 seconds. Behind such a precise and even harsh time, the director traveled all over Paris to find a category that perfectly matched the volume and density. In the silent shot, Julie stares intently and even fascinatedly at the sugar cube. The director did not let the actors directly tell the audience about their inner pain. Instead, she expresses her state of mind at the moment through seemingly inconspicuous foreign objects: wanting to escape from everything, including friendship, love, memories, and even all the ways of life in the past.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >3, the author director Kieslowski's distinct creative style: the recurrence of fading black screens and the silent bystander</h1>
The so-called "author director" is a title for art director proposed by the French New Trend. One of the biggest characteristics of this type of director is that the film has a distinct, recognizable personal character. For example, the famous director Hitchcock likes to make cameos in his own films, which is a way for him to "autograph" his own works. Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye in China belong to the author and director. And Kieslowski is undoubtedly a perfect author-director. In this film, he signed himself two names.
1. The recurrence of the fading black screen:
The fading picture gradually disappears into the darkness. In ordinary movies, fading represents the end of a scene, or the change of a period of time. But the fading use of "Blue" is ingenious. For example, in this scene, in the pool, Lucy asks Julie, "Are you crying?" Julie looked at her, the picture faded into darkness, and then switched to the picture just now. Julie replied, "It's just water." "It is clear here that there is no change or disappearance of time between the two people's dialogue, and the two are still in the same time and space. But the sudden darkness of the picture shows the despair of Julie's heart like a black hole, and she falls into an extremely painful situation at that moment.
The same fading also occurs after Julie discovers that her husband has a mistress. When Oliver asked her, "What do you want to do?" "The picture fades into darkness, and then it switches to normal. Julie replied, "Go find her." For Julie, who is still immersed in the pain of widowhood, the accidental discovery of a mistress seems absurd and incredible. She had not yet healed the pain, but fell into inexplicable jealousy.
There are four fades in this film, which enhances the stylization of this film and is an expression of the director's success and genius.
2. Silent bystander
There are two silent bystanders in this film. One is a teenager who plays with the ball in the car accident scene at the beginning of the film. The director shoots from his point of view, showing us how a tragic car accident happened. His gaze has the meaning of a witness, and the tragic sense of fatalism of ancient Greece. The other onlooker was the old woman who threw the bottle at her waist. Interestingly, the old woman also appeared in two other "Red" and "White". She entered from "Blue" and exited from "Red", stringing together a trilogy.
Such silent bystanders have also recurred in Kieslowski's other films, such as The Ten Commandments and The Two Flowers, and have become the imprint of his creative style.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > written at the end:</h1>
The heroine Julie was eventually rescued, escaped from the cage of emotions and memories brought by blue, and accepted a scarred life. Blue may reappear, but this time, she walks out of Blue and reconciles with herself. The film starts with blue, ends with blue, starts with tragedy, but ends with comedy. If you and I who watch this film can get a little resonance from it, or understand something, it is like Kieslowski himself said: "It is worth making this movie." "