I just rewatched Blue from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s color trilogy. When I watched it in my early twenties, I completely loved it and remember it stayed with me for several days. (Of course, I also fell in love with the actress and the cultured life in France.) I am happy to see that I still like it, although the experience didn’t feel as big this time. This time, I have already seen the movie. More importantly, I have lived many more experiences since then so the themes are more familiar in a visceral sense.
The main theme for Blue is liberté, freedom. Julie seeks freedom from the painful memories of her past life by escaping to an anonymous life in the city. She probably needs that life and distance for a while. And she finds real healing by going back – literally and metaphorically – to what’s left of her old life. She lives a life that uses ingredients from her old life with a new lover who was a friend of her deceased husband, finishing her husband’s composition, and – presumably – being in the life of his son with another woman.
She uses her old life as compost for a new life.
We take our distance from something and return to digest it and create a new life from it. Life invites us to return, and life sometimes requires us to return to digest and create a new life.
It’s a dynamic that happens in small glimpses in daily life, and sometimes through larger movements.
That’s familiar to me. In smaller ways, I cycle through leaving and returning and digesting. In a larger movement, I left my old life by going to another continent and living a different life and later returned – literally and metaphorically – to find healing in the old, to digest it and make it into compost for a new life.