“vital screen of fantasy” ?
maybe the right word here is ‘lens’.
the early shot in three colors: blue of julie's daughter in the back of the car watching the freeway traffic through the rear window, where from the outside of the car we see the tunnel lights stretching, flaring and streaking in complex repetitions across the window's glass, and julie's daughter's face in drowsy absorption.
in the next shot the images appear hemispherically distorted, but notice also that the window and its defroster lines are visible in both shots. the point is not just that the child experiences the world through a wide-angle lens, but to bring our attention to the lens itself.
later, in the hospital, julie receives the news that her husband and daughter died in the crash. an image of the doctor is reflected off of julie's iris in extreme closeup. he appears as if floating, decontextualized, severed from the hospital room, a nervous apparition poofed into being to deliver tragic news.
there is an enormous semantic difference in seeing a person's body and face as they look, watch, or gaze at an object and something like this. a person's face distorts my idea of their gaze. their consciousness, their insideness. the body monopolizes and the face steals the show. here, however, only the gaze and its object exists. we see…seeing. now that i think of it, is it at all strange to you that the eyes have a surface?
upon hearing the news, the first thing Julie does is shatter a window to distract the nurse from her station, where she tries to kill herself with a bottle of pills. what she fails to accomplish here she will attempt again through other means, by shattering the many other symbolic windows that provide throughways to her self.
she is later visited by Olivier, one of her husband's collaborators, who gives her a Philips 3LC2000/19G portable TV to watch her husband and daughter's funeral on a public channel. julie's husband was a world-renowned composer, whose last unfinished work was commissioned by the UN to celebrate the unification of Europe after the cold war. having julie watch her husband's funeral from under the covers of a hospital bed on a screen no bigger than a petit ecolier biscuit is kieslowski's way of distantiating julie from the noise of her husband's fame. fame weaves an impenetrable image that provides the empty hearts that feed on it with an illusion of familiarity and possession. this image, this symbolic network, is meaningless vapor.
in the next scene, julie is startled from a nap by orchestral strings only she can hear as blue light floods the screen in pulses. julie, noticing the camera, follows with her eyes as it swings to the side and back. the blue light accompanies the music, ebbs when the music fades. it doesn't flood the world so much as it saturates the lens itself.
what follows is julie's attempt to sever herself from her suffering: she orders her lawyer to put the estate on the market, guts the house of all belongings save one mattress, sleeps with Olivier on it, says goodbye to him the next morning, destroys her husband's unfinished work, assumes her maiden name and moves to an apartment in Paris where no one she knows can find her.
one night, she is woken up by the sound of a brawl on the street. she watches as three men pummel another man who manages to escape into her apartment complex. they chase him up the stairs as he knocks on different doors and begs for refuge; he knocks on her door but she does nothing; when the noise disappears she goes out into the hallway to investigate and accidentally locks herself out. of course, what happens to the man is happening to her: both are on the run from a violence that hounds them. what looks like a liberating freedom—a freedom from her past and possessions—turns out instead to be its opposite. she falls asleep on the staircase to a music only she can hear as beads of blue lights play across the screen.
in the next scene, julie is visited by a neighbor who asks her to sign a petition to evict lucille, the woman who lives a floor below her, for being a whore, which julie refuses.
this is a reference to the tenant, though i'm not really clear on what's being said by it. is julie's attempt to reinvent herself at bottom the desire to be cored like an apple, to become ontologically hollow like trelkovsky? trelkovsky was so vacant of self he became possessed by the spirit of a suicide; yet julie is full of a pain and grief she can't escape. the reference seems to reinforce the idea that the act of running away from something is itself a form of bondage. and anyway, isn't it absurd, since the thing she so desires to be free from is inside her? and how do you go about stripping yourself of that?
meanwhile, olivier has been looking all over for her. he finds her in a cafe and they sit over coffee. the effect here is so slight a screenshot wouldn't show it, but when a waiter brings the coffee over, an image of his arm is doubled on screen, as if the act were being viewed from behind a pane of glass, the waiter's arm reflected ghostlike on its surface.
olivier remarks that the song being played on the flute by a beggar outside the cafe sounds a lot like her husband's unfinished symphony; when olivier leaves, she asks the beggar where he heard the song he's playing, to which he replies, "i make up a lot of stuff."
i'm not really sure what to make of this scene. is the point to have julie encounter outside of herself the music that haunts the inmost chambers of her heart, the same music she threw into the jaws of a garbage truck a few months earlier? have you ever read a book and felt complete surprise that, yes, that's exactly how it feels? and did it ever feel like a fist unclenching its fingers around a memory you thought was buried for good, a feeling you thought was only yours? the song she hears inside herself, a private, incommunicable experience, is communicated to her here, at random, meaninglessly, not as the grieving widow of the composer who wrote it, but as a passerby, faceless and insignificant. there is something liberating about this.
when julie returns to her apartment, she finds a mischief of newborn mice and their mother on the floor of her storage closet. the mice are raw and pink and transparent and unfurred and sort of squirming helplessly around, some with their little paws in the air. as julie kneels to get a closer look, a sliver of cold, white, objective light rests on a portion of her face, as if she were peeping through a crack at the bare, unfiltered life of basic survival. in other words, at herself: at a life stripped of its meaning, fantasies, symbols.
her reaction to this is, perhaps not absurdly, to meet with her realtor the next day and ask him for help in looking for another apartment. failing this, she asks a neighbor to borrow his cat, and lucille to clean up the mess. the intense distress she feels at this is new, though her grief still incomplete: if the event that triggers it is trivial, the feelings it inspires are ultimately directed at herself, in particular at her acts of self-destruction following the death of her husband and daughter. it's a distress she has refused herself to feel up until this moment. she is no longer confident that the stripped-down life she has crafted for herself can be called freedom.
this white, objective light appears again on julie's face in the strip club where lucille works as a dancer. the latter's voice is urgent when she calls julie late one night for help. as she explains, one of the dancers on stage in five asks her for a hand in getting hard, and she rubs his cock.
after i changed, i came here for a drink. i looked around the audience for no reason. right there...in the first row, i saw my father [here the dancer thanks lucille and leaves]. he looked tired...almost nodding off...but he kept staring at the girl's ass. the bastard who let you in wouldn't make him leave. if you pay, you get to watch, you know?
lucille, julie asks, why do you do this? because i like it, lucille says. her face is lit by a warm, orange light.
the story she tells reminds me of a myth in ovid's metamorphoses, in which the god mercury, flying above a festival for athena, catches a glimpse of the beautiful herse and falls in love with her. he decides to pay a visit to her home without disguising himself. he fixes his hair, puts on his best gold-trimmed suit and, entering the first room of the house, meets herse's sister aglauros, who agrees to help with his romantic pursuit for a heavy sum of gold (mercury's words in this exchange are also undisguised: be loyal to your sister and agree to be my child's aunt, he basically says). meanwhile the goddess minerva witnesses the deal and remembers aglauros's prior profanity, in which she looks into a covered cradle minerva expressly forbade her to look into, since it hid a child she wanted to keep secret. the vengeful minerva then asks the goddess envy for help in infecting aglauros, which eventually leads to her forbidding mercury entry into the home. mercury punishes aglauros by turning her into stone, and he flies away. there are two transgressions here that get tied together by the myth in a nice way: mercury's refusal to disguise himself both in appearance and language, and aglauros's gaze into minerva's cradle. in both cases, aglauros sees too much, too nakedly.
the obscenity of lucille's father sitting front row at the strip club she works at is not the puritanical shame in the sexual nature of her work (which she enjoys), but that her father in that moment becomes like any other man: he is stripped of his symbolic identity as father, caretaker, family, and appears to her in the new, denatured context as an ordinary man, an ordinary customer, an ordinary pervert. it's in this context that lucille notices julie's face on a television set in another room, where the news segment will inform the latter that her husband was having an affair.
during the segment the anchorwoman says: he was a great man. one of the most important composers of our time. i think people like him belong to all of us.
to someone whose life and grief are tethered to a private world of memories and feelings, this is deeply liberating: learning that the world you lost was wrong, a fantasy that you alone upheld. a couple scenes later, julie runs after olivier's car on the street to ask him why he decided to finish her husband's concerto. it's the first time in the movie julie runs toward something, rather than away from it. the duplicative effect described earlier in the cafe occurs here again when olivier brakes, and multiple copies of the volvo's red lights flare up across the screen.
the effect is a species of lens flare that can be achieved by stacking multiple filters on a camera lens so that the light bounces off of the different layers of glass and echoes on screen as above. repetitions like these are called ghosts, though in the context of the movie what's important is that another lens is introduced by olivier in the interest of a shared fantasy, a shared perspective, a mutual love, a life in common.
i heard you're finishing patrice's concerto, she says. i thought i might try, he says. you can't. you have no right. it will never be the same, she says. i'll tell you why, he says. i told myself, 'it's a way.' a way to make you cry, to make you run. the only way to make you say 'i want' or 'i don't want.'
he wants to make her feel something, to take up a position, do something, grieve. she wants to preserve the fantasy she has of her husband, and therefore the fantasy of her self, which is just now beginning to crumble. she agrees to work on the composition, and the work she does on it is with a blue pen.
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