1) Tyres at blue speed a TV channel off-tune we see is jammed on Blue. The foil wrapper rattles the wind, is a disappearing. It flies in blue schema. It’s sound makes us watch, this scene is sound.
2) Her daughter watches the past recede as colour of cars in the rear window; the girl will not see it catch up or the future soundless. We will: film over the eye, the ear, of the past swimming back into a woman who
3) stopped for death. Daughter. Husband, Patrice. This eye-on-death close-up, her eye, our eye, hospital air and breath of feather, fabric, close as art-house. In dearth and in this world, wealth. Effects are alone aesthetic. The grammar of that sentence.
4) We. Our. If viewing seems singular, it’s learnt in plural. This film coheres as soundtrack, coheres as filmtrack, as tracks it more than usually coheres. We are underwater with her. Our senses fish.
5) Her track is the orchestra agush, at life at death. It. The pills she tries to swallow gag back on her hand. The Julie they met in her mouth, ugh, the self who won’t, the self the colour blue. Krzysztof! tablets so huge? They’re white, at least, for the non a colour’s inscribed on.
6) But the great music must be finished! (is music ever finished?). Form is. Not pills but Patrice’s melodramatic concerto for Europe. In his mouth, in hers? Or the flautist’s ragged busking on the pavement, lungs filling and breathing, who pipes to haunt (us) and almost live (us). Pan is loveless.
7) Love? Tightened blue in her knuckles rub bloody against the wall of stone (my back skin shifts like shingles) after she disabuses Oliver (who loves her) by making love to him, and resists the music. The crystal light-hanging (she tore from the ceiling) shimmering, that fills her hand like a glassy daughter grasped up from a river. Her grief so ruthless it weakens everyone she meets. Renouncing, them, the unfinished. Blue is the colour of scrutiny. Julie is learning: to see in the dark and feel nothing.
8) This music or grief inner as herscape, her free indirect speech, our narratology enters her like her black coffee seeps into a sugar-cube. Visual motif. We wait. We hear the flute’s high notes the sunlit busker, a melancholy nest of Preisner each film of Kieslowski.
9) Grief as pre-speech: wailing, silent, Lacanian. And post-speech, wordless. Can the imaginary be full of chords? (Must it be so serious?)
10) The frames erase story so the eye is filled by currents of blue. Not I. Don’t live with me, life, I am death. In the absence the blue the wish to swim underneath, descend, past and through, the line on the bottom of the pool the weed the frippery of light-hurting-voice of go on, kick up, break the surface, the film.
11) An orchestra erupts through surface! Her, blue, narrative … I shake and am wet but she doesn’t and isn’t and Kieslowski knows it. Music finds us and draws from where it wasn’t to where it isn’t. The remnant, trace, the film floods.
12) We are her fear of mice, a mother and its hairless young in her room: life finds her in the dark and enters her. Life is tiny and grotesque! A mouse of self-reliance! Julie wants to be without fear. (But fears mice – who will kill the mice for her?) Mice?
13) Juliet (Julie) Binoche so poised and beautiful, at a remove in her pale face, classically sculptured (her face her music) as … marble? what else to compare her to (permanence… I pause on her cheekbones, her downcast eyes, the stillness of her mouth.) The vulnerable flesh of religion. In side-frame a man rushes past, mere, plain.
14) Olivier spreads out the printer’s-quality paper (the sound of it, beautiful as Binoche) the staves close up, seeped-into by ink (coffee into sugar-cube) that only Julie can compose in her composer’s self (as Patrice, amanuensis ..?) but Olivier knows she is dead, Olivier knows she will rise. (We too.)
15) She says, show me what you’ve got (the ghost of her says). If she listens the film must run its course, its of-course. So the past catches up like cars flashing on the front of her daughter’s death.
16) No! Patrice had a lover. The lover is pregnant. Don’t think of mice! So late in the blues Julie is cheated. To lie in white sheets of music. She knows. She in her blue lack composes.
17) Composes. In her own pen her pen is, is music, lived-in like goodness. Is not all music? Too good to be true, this, his gongs and angels, she loves … something. (She knows how he loved.) There in the scrolls. ‘If I have not love… ‘ Don’t end it.
18) Love, her estate, her wealth, her blue. Her film effortless and rich, her art as class, as landed, city, aesthetic, her exception to history, her ink this gorgeous paper scratched into with love, the instruments endless.
19) If hers it is, Patrice’s it isn’t. To end or begin? She forfeits. Her denial her silly kind of love. If not hers now, when? Style more self, less love.
20) But if hers shall be his? A soprano pierces.
