Part of the Picture: Home, But Not Alone
HOME, BUT NOT ALONE
JULY 12, 2008 - AFTER THE UNTIMELY, UNEXPECTED DEATH of her husband and child, Julie (Juliette Binoche) does two things in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue: she mopes, then she copes. The key to both, she feels, is anonymity, a severance from all things past, all things that root her and give her identity, so she moves into a ratty apartment in a part of Paris where no one is likely to recognise her as the wife of a famous composer.
As she tells her mother, later on, “Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don’t want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps.” All she wants are her little stolen everyday pleasures – the ice cream she orders at the local café and which she proceeds to smother with coffee; the cigarette she lights up in her new home, exhaling in a manner that suggests she didn’t inhale, for it’s not twin flutes of smoke from the nostrils but a messy cloud from the mouth.
Julie has barely begun to relax with a cigarette, one morning, when there’s someone at the door. It’s a girl with flowers and a smile. It’s Lucille (Charlotte Véry) from downstairs, the “whore” that the other neighbour was trying to get rid of, the other day, when Julie was tending to her plants and when the suddenness of the silence being pierced by the doorbell made her drop the pot she was holding.
That earlier conversation began fairly innocently, in the vague manner that conversations often do when there’s a point to be gotten to but only after a bit of customary civility. “I heard you got locked out last week,” said the neighbour. “Your husband lent me a blanket. I spent the night in the stairwell,” said Julie. The rituals of civilisation having been observed, the neighbour got down to business. “I wanted you to sign this.”
Julie looked up from stuffing the plant back into its pot and saw a hand holding out a sheet of paper. The neighbour explained, “Everyone has signed already. We don’t want loose women in our building. The young woman downstairs…” Julie cut her off. “I don’t want to get involved.” The neighbour protested, as if Julie’s involvement was the very matter of life and death. “[But] she’s a whore.” That bit of information did nothing to Julie’s decision. “That’s not my problem,” she stated firmly.
And it’s this “whore” now, smiling at the door, extending flowers to Julie, explaining the reason for this gesture of gratitude. “To kick me out, they needed everyone’s signature. So I’m staying.” And Lucille walks in, uninvited – yet another unwelcome presence in Julie’s apartment, in Julie’s life. “Your place is cool,” Lucille observes, walking up to a lamp hung from the ceiling with blue glass beads. “When I was a kid, I had a lamp just like this.”
Julie is silent, the flowers clasped close to her chest, not knowing how to respond to this desecration of the sole remnant from her previous life, from her child’s room. She watches helplessly as Lucille continues to express familiarities with the object, as if it were her own. “I’d stand under it and stretch out my hand. I dreamt of jumping up and touching it.”
Lucille fondles the sparkling blue crystal, her voice hushed with remembered awe. “I forgot all about it. Where did you find it?” she asks Julie, who, by now, is no doubt wishing she’d signed the petition. The first hints of tears springing in her eyes, Julie simply says, “I found it.” There’s some more pointless, painful conversation, and Julie moves away to the kitchen to arrange the flowers. “Sorry, I talk too much,” says Lucille, who’s gone on to look out of the window, at the street corner where the man who plays the flute has left behind his instrument and disappeared.
Lucille leaves, and later, Julie returns home from a shopping expedition. She goes to deposit her purchases in the pantry, when she discovers that the cardboard box, in there, has been chewed through. It’s a mouse. It’s a mother, scampering around her pink translucent hairless helpless litter. Julie stares, afraid as she’s always been of mice, since childhood. She appears to have had enough of the world’s persistence in encroaching on the solitary bubble she’s trying to build for herself. As if people weren’t enough, she’s now being haunted by fears from her past.
The manager says it will take two or three months to move her to another apartment, so Julie knocks on the door of the man downstairs, the man with a cat. She borrows the animal despite his words of caution. (“He’s not neutered. He can get violent.”) She walks up to her apartment. She opens the door with the hand that isn’t wrapped around the squirming non-neutered violent creature. She kneels, she lets it in, she closes her eyes, and she shuts the door.
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