The image:
The Film:
One of the definitive films in the abbreviated career of Krystof Kieslowski, Three Colors: Blue is a meditation on freedom, grief, and what binds during our lives. Julie (Juliette Binoche), on losing her husband and child in the early moments of the film, must regard these questions in light of overwhelming grief. Her life in the aftermath of this trauma asks how one becomes free in this life when inter-connectivity has the power to destroy us. Why do we hand over that power so easily? What is the relationship between love and freedom?
Masterfully shot by Sławomir Idziak, Kieslowski’s capacity for visual poetry occupies a great deal of the space of the film. The sugar cube shot we’re looking at today is that of a later moment in the film when Julie is at a cafe and upon dipping a sugar cube into her coffee, it becomes imbued with it’s taste, a novel texture. Essentially, it undergoes a metaphysical shift. It’s undoubtedly one of the most striking images of the film, but its greater impact must be set against the some of the visual metaphors that surround it.
The film is replete with images that suggest the boundaries of the individual, boundaries that Julie literally comes into collision with through her flesh. Take for example this shot-
Julie in motion signifies a life, the stone wall the conditions in which a life is lived. Here there is no porous exchange only a brittle object grinding against her flesh. Following this abrasion of two conflicting entities, body and wall, she takes her hand to her mouth, ingesting the results of that conflict. Imagine for a second the taste and texture of blood and dirt. Even as she ingests this mixing, suggesting an exchange between inside world and out, the taste isn’t pleasant is it?
And, taking a look at the film, recognize the amount of images of Julie interacting with her environment in these abrasive, jarring ways. Whether its the repeated images of her swimming (boyant, interactive but still distinctly separate) or being pressed up against a window pane while having sex, the film is rife with these images that show her resistance to exchange.
Kieslowski, by constructing this definitive image of the sugar cube transfigured by coffee, shows us a elemental change in Julie. Part of the healing process and steps towards freedom for Julie is the ability to take in, to interact on the spiritual level with those and the world around us. Julie, as we are, is an assemblage of molecules; a sugar cube bound by chemical sweetness. When we “take in” the viscous, fluid, and unpredictable world around us, absorb that essence ever present into ourselves, the world is a sweeter place and maybe we can continue to move through it in light of the suffering we face? Freedom lies in the willingness to exchange and to allow ourselves to be transformed. We will look different on the other side of things, but the synthesis of ourselves with the world around us perhaps worth it in the end.
-Connor Novotny