The Blue Room

I watched Krzystof Kieslowski’s Trois Coleur’s: Bleue last night for maybe the tenth time. There are so many aspects of this film that never lose their dramatic effect for me. It is the streets of Paris illuminated by shades of blue, Juliette Binoche’s flawless performance and exquisite face framing bob. Most of all I am struck, as always, by the blue room.

Julie, played by Binoche, returns home after surviving an accident that has killed her husband and five year old daughter. The gardener is out trimming the hedges, green against the grey sky and stone house. She approaches softly, seemingly emotionless.

“Have you done as I asked? Have you cleared out the blue room?”

The original contents of this room are never revealed by Kieslowski. The gardner has followed orders and Julie finds it empty, only cobalt colored walls and a chandelier of small azure crystals hanging in the centre. She leaves her home, her life, and takes only a string of chandelier beads with her.

I have always seen the house as the architectural metaphor for Julie prior to the accident. The blue room is her soul and the beads are her soul illuminated by fate. They are all she can bear, in her sorrow, to hold onto and are symbolic of her will to live in the face of devastation.

Everyone has their own blue room. A space, with its own individual characteristics, that haunts their life and never lets them go. In his song, “Tonight Will be Fine”, Leonard Cohen describes his room.

I choose the rooms that I live in with care.
The windows are small and the walls are bare.
There is only one breath, there is only one care,
And I wait every night for your step on the stair.

This is perhaps reflective of Buddhist beliefs; the bare walls and small windows, a single breath awaiting the sound of God.

Ever since I saw Trois Couleurs: Bleue, I have painted a room in every house I have ever lived in, for a long period of time anyways, a different shade of blue. Cerulean, azure, and cobalt create distinct backgrounds for specific events. I string them together with the continuity of a root shade so to remind myself that some things stay the same. When I meet people I'm sometimes curious if their walls are bare, or blue, or if they've ever even bothered to think about it.