Heat Death
The Blue Room / directed by Mathieu Amalric
A crime has been committed, but for much of the enigmatic and resonant The Blue Room we are left to surmise its scope. The accused, Julien Gahyde (played by the film’s director, Mathieu Amalric), is asked by a prosecutorial figure (Laurent Poitrenaux) to describe his relationship with his mistress, Esther Despierre (Lea Drucker). Though the procedure is bureaucratic and invasive, Julien seems eager to cooperate with this interrogating father figure. The flashbacks of the recollections he provides are neatly integrated into the film’s flow; but from the start you have an impression that these recollections are all-too vivid to Julien, that part of him is still living in the times past that he describes. And though he protests his innocence from the get-go, he lacks a certain conviction; he is like a man who can’t decide whether he wants to escape or be bound.
The initial scene he describes resonates through the rest of the tale he tells. Set in the bedroom Esther shares with her husband, it is the single time we see Julien and Esther as lovers, and it turns out to be their last rendezvous. The two of them appear to exist in a heightened state of intimacy - Julien seems overcome by her presence, and at one point Esther bites his lip, drawing blood - and yet oddities abound. What are we to make of Julien’s complicated reaction to Esther’s question as to whether they could be happy with each other forever? What of the small-scale bloodletting? And why does Esther seem so calm when Julien spies her husband suddenly approaching the house?
As our knowledge of what has transpired grows more complete, and we start to observe divergences between Julien’s recollection and what he tells his questioner, a curious thing happens: although we gain a sharper sense of what has happened, our sense of why it happened becomes if anything more and more obscure. Is it because Julien is insane? Because his lover is a cold-blooded murderess? More than this, the more the prosecutor probes their history, the more hermetically sealed and complicated the nature of Esther and Julien’s relationship becomes. Between the time of his last tryst with Esther and his arrest, Julien appears to have spent most of his time in a state of paralysis, even as Esther sends him cryptic communications that suggest she is ready to take extreme measures to bring them together. The Freudian overtones are impossible to ignore -- he is like a little boy who has been allowed to indulge his incestuous feelings for his mother, but then left the dirty work of topping father to female devices.
As for Esther, Drucker gives a stunning performance as a woman balanced ambiguously between obsessive love and madness, a villainy I found more persuasive than a hundred cackling Jokers. She conveys an intense sexuality that is at the same time directed specifically at Julien, under the pressure of which he seems pinned like a butterfly. The two lovers are together twice in the story’s present, and in the context of a film that is resolutely clinical and understated in tone, both scenes startle with their electricity, in the rush of their dark history erupting into the now.