Three Colors: Blue

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski

1993 / 94min / DCP

The first entry in Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy—his final artistic statement before his early death and one of three great success stories of ’90s arthouse cinema—is a film as somber as its name implies, a cool, cobalt-shaded study in loss and abjection starring Juliette Binoche (who won a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her stinging, stricken performance) as a recent widow who has shut herself off from life in response to her still-raw emotional devastation, only to be pulled back towards the perils of fellow-feeling by a former lover and a budding friendship with a neighbor. “Indisputably the work of a master.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader

Part of Visionary Auteurs: Five Decades of mk2