#kieslowski

Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993)

Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993, Kieślowski)

" I like films where I glimpse a bit of life without knowing how it began or how it ends. "

'' çoğu insan

büyük ve küçük yenilgilerin yükünü içinde

taşır.''

los lugares que alguna vez recorrimos…

You know the thing where you like the same thing as a terrible person?

I guess even Lear-esque cringey edgelords like great movies and Keith McNally is not wrong about Sexy Beast and definitely definitely not wrong about the Double Life of Veronique, a movie I've now seen 3x, 2 of which ended in helpless tears (the only way I know if something is art).

This movie was a selection by McNally at a Roxy Cinema mini-festival in October 2023. As I told the crew who I invited (tricked?) to see the movie: now it's your turn to think about it for 15 years!

I love the moment after the movie when people are asking helplessly -- but what does the movie mean?!? And I really, really love the moment when people get angry at the end of the movie. These are real emotions! What's the last time a movie made you think anything other than "god, that was 45 minutes too long?" (The Double Life of Veronique is under 100 minutes! yessss)

[I didn't hear it cause I was, like, weeping, but my friend said at the end a guy behind us was angrily griping that the movie was too slow? Huh? Stuff is literally happening every moment of the movie? There is not a single wasted scene, line or frame? What even are these senses whose proofs we can so liberally ignore?]

Since it might be another 15 years until I see it again and I don't have the benefit of just having written a college thesis that was mostly about Lacan via Zizek, I thought I would type out a few thought exercises/interpretative frameworks that I think apply to this movie:

The contingent nature of the universe/the senselessness of existense -- probably the easiest to justify, especially in the context of Kieslowski's complete ouevre, in consideration of his personal history, based on the interviews he's given, etc...

What to do about emotional apocrypha — what do you do with and about feelings that seem to come from nowhere? Feelings are "real" and we know now (i.e. the science is now there to tell us, eg Lisa Feldman Barrets's fascinating work) they're not in any way subservient in value or usefulness to "reason"; like if anything the opposite, emotions are the "why" and reason is the very patched together and incomplete "how" behind what we are and what we do. Worth thinking about why it is Kieslowski's most compelling films have female protagonists given the historical association to the binary genders for emotion vs reason.

The duality and dichotomy of post-war East/West Europe -- I think this one is sorta obvious but not less resonant? There's a good article out there about how the film predicted a lot of the consequences of the EU. Elsewhere I've read that Polish critics pilloried Kieslowski for a traitor to his kind over this theme, which reminded me of the story about how Bach's works were sometimes not well received by the church patrons who got to hear a lot of it first because they thought it was too dour -- imagine you have the greatest musician who will ever live as your church musician and your biggest peeve is his music isn't fun enough for Sunday. In any event this is a major theme in Three Colors, and I'm sure there's no accident that this movie and the Trilogy are connected by the same fake composer (key work = "Song for the Unification of Europe"...)

Return to theory in film (Zizek) -- he wrote a whole book about it. I'm not sure I agree Kieslowski's films make the case for the return to Theory (ie I think you can interpret his movies without it.) But the fact that you can so unbelievably seamlessly integrate his films to a Lacanian framework gives me that feeling of the inevitability of Lacan.

Art Cinema's enduring interest in interrogating the limits of its medium -- which of course is also present in art literature for its own medium, and frequently not only present but foregrounded in theatre. The Puppetmaster is a clear analogue to the filmmaker (and of God, lmao...they can't help themselves), but also all the unbelievably uncomfortable sex scenes in this movie are a masterclass on the male gaze and how you constitute and undermine it...etc.

Space-time Travel (Zizek) -- right away, I'm going to say I don't think this one is all that interesting, but it's what Criterion chose to accompany the 15th year re-release of the movie. So...ok 🤷🏽‍♀️ I'd say that listening to physics podcasts has convinced me of the value of a literary education (those hermeneutical skills come in so handy), so I see the relevance of thinking of these two together, but I also feel like the fake math is the part of Lacan I always found a little too silly to stand.

The agony of art as vocation -- I'm sorta lazily splitting this out from #5 just because when I originally wrote this post I had 7 points and now I can only remember 6 of them, and I like the resonance of 7....There's a Badiou-esque invocation of the four types of truth procedures at work in this movie that could easily fill the pages of another unread senior thesis: science -- the zizek time travel thing, the way the movie is, actually, concerned with the explanation of what is happening and why, rather than just accepting as a premise that there can be doubles in the world; politics -- the scene where Weronika meets Veronique is at a political rally, the east/west thing mentioned above, etc; art and love, obviously.... But the key to the "plot" of Veronique's life is "Does she keep singing, even if it kills her?"

Random closing thoughts:

I'm still thinking about and cannot resolve the mystery of the subplot about Veronique testifying in her friend's divorce(?) trial. What does it mean?