On Liberty

Yesterday I watched the movie "Trois couleurs: Bleu". A lot has been said about this movie and its director and on how amazingly he uses images instead of words to convey meanings. It is true that there are some quite amazing images in the movie, but since I have absolutely no theoretical knowledge about movie making, I am not even going to approach that topic.
Two things impressed me in this movie, though.

First, the beautiful music.

Second, the concept of liberty. Kieslowski created this movie trilogy based on the three colors of the French flag. The blue on the flag symbolizes liberty and that is what this movie is about. Un unexpected kind of liberty, though. The one we have to loose to become human.

Julie (Juliette Binoche), the main character of the movie, looses her husband and daughter in a car accident and suddenly finds herself potentially free from the world. She has no immediate family now and the only other relative is a senile mother who does not remember her. She then goes through a process of separation from the world: sells her house, leaving the servants that had a emotional connection with her, and has sex with a man that loved her, in order to show him that she is just a woman like any other and free him from her. She destroys her husband's final composition that was apparently also writen by her and rents an appartment away from everyone she knows. Getting rid of all emotional connections, she attains ultimate freedom .

During the rest of the movie, we see how this process is undone. A female neighbor is the first one to break the spell by showing gratitude, compassion and need. But the disappointment with her husband both professionally (Julie finds out that he "stole" some of his melodies from a street musician) and emotionally (she finds out he had been seeing another woman for years) is what I think brings Julie back to life. Maybe it makes her understand that there was more than happiness in the past and more than grief in the present. Julie reconnects with the world, rebuilds community, suffers, looses freedom and becomes human again.