The Ego, the Eye, and the Camera Lens—A Psychoanalytic Reading of Traumatic Loss and Mourning in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours Blue (1993)

Abstract

This is the first film of a trilogy (Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White, Three Colours Red) representing the French flag and the ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, fraternity, and equality. The main characters appear briefly in all three films, and all together in the close of the final film. In Three Colours Blue (Liberty) Julie (Juliet Binoche), survives a car accident that kills her famous composer husband, Patrice, and their little daughter, Anna. From this point, the film is about the interior of Julie—her mind, her experience, her self—as she comes to terms with her traumatic injury. Julie attempts suicide during her recovery, is unable to attend the funeral and watches it screened, nationwide, without any apparent emotion. She moves out of the family home taking a single object from the past, a blue glass mobile, seemingly cutting all her connections with her family and life of the past. Her husband's friend, Olivier, also a composer, declares his love for Julie, but she makes love to him and then coldly rejects him. Julie, who had had a part to play in her husband's compositions, destroys his last grand work on the union of Europe, which he was in the midst of writing (a transcription of the score is luckily retained, unknown to Julie). Julie now lives on her own in a new flat. She makes very little contact with others, except for a young woman neighbour, Lucille, who works as a striptease artist and prostitute, and eventually, with Olivier, who pursues her. When she visits her mother in a residential home, Julie finds little comfort from her as the mother is distracted and demented. A boy who was at the scene of the accident, where he had found a chain with a cross, returns it to Julie and reminds her of the moments just before the car crashed when the family were last alive together.

Julie next, painfully, learns that her husband Patrice had had, for many years, a mistress who is now bearing his child. She also discovers Patrice's music is being finished by Olivier and will perhaps be publicly performed. Slowly, rather unwillingly, she engages in reworking the music with him. With an ambiguous gesture, she offers her old home to Patrice's mistress and baby, and finally gives herself to Olivier. The scene of their love-making, which closes the film, is set to the anthem of Patrice, with St Paul's words to the Corinthians on Caritas (Love) and its centrality to human existence. Loss and mourning are inconclusively and ambiguously represented in detail throughout the film, as of course is the subject of liberty. The central character, Julie, may be seen as one representation of liberty in Rousseau's famous statement in Du Contrat Social “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Notes

This article was derived from a talk given as part of the film cycle on Loss and Mourning. The event was organised by Andrea Sabbadini and Peter Evans at the ICA on 16 May 2004. My thanks to Leon Kleimberg for his help with clinical work in progress that relates to some aspects of this discussion.