The Blue Room

Synopsis: In a French provincial town a successful businessman (Mathieu Amalric) finds himself in jail accused of murder.

With The Blue Room, well-known French actor Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Venus In Fur ) delivers an elegant, economical and elliptical account of a crime passionel although precisely who has committed the crime is the question that the film asks.

Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a married man who is having an affair with Esther (played by Amalric's real-life partner Stéphanie Cléau). When the film opens we discover them in the hotel room named by the film’s title where they regularly meet to indulge in passionate love-making. Unlike Esther, Julien carries the burden of deception uneasily.  Such is the set-up as the film suddenly cuts to Julien being interrogated by the police, then an investigating judge. Clearly a murder or murders have taken place and slowly and methodically the film reveals what has happened.  

Although the elements of the plot are timeless what is strikingly different about The Blue Room is the oblique approach that Almaric takes to unfolding it as he shifts between the objective and the subjective.  In this respect I was strongly reminded of Guiseppe Tornatore’s 1995 film Une Pure Formalité in which Roman Polanski’s police inspector cross-examines Gérard Depardieu’s confused writer over a suspected murder.

While the investigating judge sifts the evidence looking for hard facts, Julien, like a man recalling a dream remembers events only in fragments tempered by his current predicament. How much of this is directly taken from Georges Simenon's source novel I cannot say but as the narrative cuts at will into the story of the torrid affair cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne and editor François Gédigier deftly develop a refracted portrait of a man caught in the maze of his own falsehoods.

Almaric plays Julien like a man in shock unable to comprehend how and why things turned out they way that they have.  Ultimately we the audience get closure but it is clear that the condemned man never will.

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