Expressive

This is the strangest scene in “Three Colors: Blue,” one necessary to move along elements of the plot, but one that also feels out of place with the style and tone of the rest of the film. Julie is asleep at home when she’s awoken by a call. Lucille pleads with Julie to please come right away to some sex club in Pigalle. Julie at first refuses, but Lucille continues to beg, and says she’s never asked her for anything before. That’s technically true, but we know Julie’s already done her a big favor in the past.

Still, I guess cleaning up the mice has to be repaid somehow. So Julie escapes her serenity to visit the most sleazy neighborhood in Paris. Actually, Pigalle isn’t so bad anymore. I think the movie “Amelie” went a long way towards restoring the neighborhood’s reputation and now it’s just considered a dark alley in Montmartre rather than the Times Square of Paris.

But in the early 90s when the movie was made, Pigalle was still very seedy, so it was asking a lot for Lucille to have Julie enter this neighborhood alone, never mind meet her inside of a sex shop. It’s a very strange establishment. I assume what’s going on, based on conversations, is that there’s live sex performed that patrons can watch. But Kieslowski is clearly uneasy putting anything explicit on screen, so it all looks like what a hardcore Catholic imagines a sex shop might look like.

Anyway, Julie arrives and goes upstairs to meet Lucille, who now seems much more composed that she was on the phone. She apologizes for having Julie make the trip and says everything is fine now. She goes on to explain that while she was getting ready for one of her allotted times on stage, she looked out into the audience and saw her father. She tried to get the bouncer to get rid of him, but he wouldn’t, and she was freaked out about what she was going to do. But apparently he got bored with the show and noticed that the last train was about to leave for the night, so he left.

After telling this story, Lucille nudges Julie to look at a television in the establishment (a strangely staged scene, by the way, the TV seems to be quite far away, but Julie can see and hear everything on the screen quite well.) There she sees a picture of herself onscreen. Then the scene cuts to the same TV journalist who tried to ambush interview her at the hospital and Olivier. He’s discussion how he has been commissioned to take over Patrice’s symphony.

We get a little more detail about the project. It was (and apparently now still is) to be performed by 12 different European orchestras in 12 different cities simultaneously, then never played again. Olivier explains that finishing the score will be difficult because it’s hard to figure out what Patrice had in mind. Then he says one of the most important lines of the film:

He was not an expressive man. Only his wife Julie understood him.

From here we see a collection of Patrice’s pictures onscreen. Towards the end of the collection, we see a number of shots of Patrice with a young woman, who we’ll learn is named Sandrine. We in the moviegoing audience saw these same pictures earlier in the film and perhaps assumed that Julie was aware that this woman was his mistress. But seeing the expression on her face, it’s clear that she was not fully aware of what was going on.

I think it was a very strange way to have Julie find out that Olivier has taken up this project and for her to discover the truth about Patrice. I also find it really horrible of Olivier to allow these photographs go on TV. If he loves Julie like he professes, shouldn’t he actively protect her instead of exposing her to public attention and gossip?

NOTE TO READER: I feel safe attaching a note here because no one ever comes by this blog and I see no reason for anyone to start now. If by pinging this story you were sending me a message that something I’ve done has exposed you to public attention or gossip, please find a way to let me know if there is anything still on the web or in the process of being published that makes you uncomfortable and I will remove it immediately. I deeply apologize for any exposure or embarrassment you might have suffered from anything else I have written. I have followed my user stats carefully thought out this process to determine when, and in what forums, and for how long, it is safe to post more personal information that has the potential to point at others, even though I believe I took great pains to never identify anyone. If I failed in this regard, I deeply regret it.