Before the story has begun, she has bitten his lip and
drawn blood. When the story ends, someone has been convicted of murder. In
the middle, everything is gray. Director/star Mathieu Amalric has confessed that
what drew him to Georges Simenon’s novel “Le Chambre Bleu” was that it begins in
the middle of an affair, indeed the middle of a tryst. The impermanence of any
story or memory builds like bile in the guts of “The Blue Room.” We think we
know, but can we dissect our remembrances, run over every glance and word with
a magnifying glass, retroactively turn the scene of an affair into the scene of
a crime? Amalric’s hero, so enfeebled by compromise he hardly merits the word,
finds himself in a maze he has constructed out of his own half truths, deadened
emotions and simmering resentments and he can’t remember the way out. The best
he can do is remember what it felt like to share the blue room of a hotel with
the woman who changed his life.
Amalric is Julien Gahyde, a man with debilitating
confidence. He has a wife and child, a pristine modern home, a lucrative job
and a beautiful mistress. Everything is perfect and he can’t enjoy any of it.
His time with Esther (played fittingly enough by Amalric’s partner Stéphanie
Cléau) is sweaty and desperate, and immediately dissolves into ritual. He must run
across town to get to his car, parked a discreet distance away. He must perfect
the lie he’ll tell his wife about the bloody lip Esther gave him, and deliver
it with the right degree of detached disinterest. He must pretend to be
himself.
Parsing out the real Julien from the one he pretends to be becomes
more difficult when we realize he’s landed himself in jail. These events are
now being recalled before a judge because someone has been murdered. Amalric
plays coy about the crime, hopping around the chronology of Julien’s dalliance
looking for clues. We see evidence emerge every time we leap to a new scene
even as we change our picture of Julien himself. The more he lies in memory,
the more human and less obvious a suspect he seems. “The Blue Room”‘s slippery
perspective fits a character who wonders if he ever understood a single second
of his meticulously drawn life. Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne
and editor François Gédigier sand down and shellac the polycephalous narrative
into fleeting, perfect surfaces. Julien looks through his past but he cannot
touch any of it, the truth as volatile as the passions that drove him to
misfortune.
Amalric’s careful yet exuberant direction is nothing
new. His first five fiction features utilize depth more expertly than most 3D
features, but here his images have been wrought with laser precision. Shot in
Academy Ratio, “The Blue Room” mimes Julien’s predicament by imprisoning him in
small square frames long before the public trial has commenced. He stares off
screen at an answer that won’t come, combing his myriad flashbacks for the
answer as if turning a glass Rubix cube. The subtle directionality of the compositions
and the constant shifts from the present to the past, “The Blue Room” often feels
like a work of cinematic futurism, not dissimilar to the films of Steven
Soderbergh. It constructs ideal romantic and erotic zones, only to eye them
from a clinical remove mere seconds later. The past must run to keep up
with the progress of the trial. The
crime at the heart of “The Blue Room” eventually becomes clear enough, but the
people involved remain mysterious. Amalric puts the audience inside his
convicted murderer’s head to get them closer to the details but even that point
of view remains fatally limited. Julien cannot break out of the little box he
has constructed and make any sense of the timeline surrounding the murder. He
can’t even believe his own version of events or trust that he knows who Esther
really was. “The Blue Room” has many questions and very few answers. Even if
it did, who would trust them?
Source:: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-blue-room-2014
