Motifs

”Blue” opens in tragedy. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert called “Blue” an anti-tragedy in the way it subverts our expectations. While tragic flaws lead to the destruction of protagonists in the classical model, Julie has a different destiny. She cannot escape her innate kindness no matter how hard she tries to walk away from it. It keeps drawing her back to people and away from the precipice.

The opening scene introduces two motifs that will return throughout the film, the circle and the window. Circles in ”Blue” are statements of destiny. The wheel of life is turning and the characters in the film are powerless to resist. Windows, on the other hand, are signs of vulnerability. No matter how much characters wish to stand firmly for themselves without being affected by the influence of others, windows keep reminding them that they cannot stand alone, that there is a life outside the window that includes them, even if they feel immediately separated.

The wheel is the first thing we see in “Blue.” It’s a car tire, bathed in steely blue from both sides. It creates the harsh sound of whistling wind. From the perspective of this tire, driving appears chaotic and violent. Cars honk at one another.

We next see a windows, a car window slightly rolled down. A girl’s hand holds a silvery blue candy wrapper outside the window. This feels like my childhood to me, but not the one of my children. I do not know the car culture in France, but today you rarely see children out of their car seats and holding anything out the window. In 1970s New Jersey, it was just another day. The girl lets go of the wrapper, it flies away.

We next see her looking out the back window of the car, again a remnant of childhood car culture long lost. For the rest of the film, the girl’s mother Julie will always think of her daughter in association with the color blue. But this is the only scene in the movie we’re allowed to take in from the girl’s point of view, and as she looks out the back window at the traffic, we’re overcome with the kaleidoscope of color. Watching the cars jockey behind her, it reminds me of the Stargate scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The last two visual artifacts are yellow orbs: more circles, more destiny.

The car stops on the side of the road and the girl runs off towards the bushes to pee. Her father steps out of the car and stretches. He is played by French film actor Hugues Quester, but he’s shown only from the back now and we never get a full-on live shot of his face in the film. Quester was best known at this point of his career for an Eric Rohmer film called “A Tale of Springtime,” where he seemed completely miscast as a romantic lead and came off to me as awkward even by French standards. There will be another prominent Rohmer actor later in the film and they will reappear throughout Kieslowski’s trilogy. The director loves to make sly references to other movies, often by casting people who evoke certain cinematic memories.

The movie then cuts to the bottom of the car, where we see what looks to be a dripping brake line. Unbeknownst to the driver and passengers, the car is cursed, its fate sealed. The car tire we saw in motion before is framed in the shot beside the dripping line.

We then get our first glimpse of Antoine, playing a child’s game with a ball and a stick, the kind of annoying physical puzzle you can toy with for ours without ever catching correctly. As the family’s Alfa Romeo pulls out of the fog and moves past him, he throws the ball up again and catches it, which makes him smile. At this moment, he hears the screeching of brakes, and looks up to see the car smashed against a tree.

We see what appears to be a dog run across our field of vision, perhaps Patrice swerved to avoid it. The back passenger door of the car flings open and out of it comes a beach ball, another of Kieslowski’s circles. The car is smoking. We see a few papers fly out of it. There is no sight or sound of any passengers.

Patrice first looks down at his skateboard (more wheels) and we can see him running rapidly towards the car. About a quarter of the way there, he seems to realize that a muddy field provides him no opportunity to race to the rescue Marty McFly style on his skateboard, so he tosses it aside. From a distance, we see him arrive at the car and start to look inside. But at this point, the film fades to blue and then to black.