ABSTRACT
Three Colors: Blue (Canada/U.S. title) is the first of acclaimed Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski's French-language trilogy Three Colors: Blue, White, and Red (1993–94) and is ostensibly about music, the compositional process, and the haunting qualities of music that motivate character interactions. Blue's protagonist, Julie, possesses a unique relationship to music that is represented by her acts of composition and musical editing throughout the film. ATher losing her husband, Patrice de Courcy, a famed European composer, and young daughter Anna in a tragic car accident, Julie is haunted by fragments of her husband's last and unfinished work: the Song for the Unification of Europe. Shocked by the trauma of her loss, Julie severs all ties to her previous life and purposefully chooses a new life of isolation and emotional disconnection, hiding in anonymity in Paris. T roughout the film she is overwhelmed by the presence of musical fragments associated with her husband and daughter's joint funeral and the Song. Only through Julie's confrontation with this music, through the act of finishing the Song collaboratively with her husband's former secretary, Olivier, is Julie relieved of the disturbing musical fragments and able to begin the work of healing.
