“I have a perfect wife, a daughter whom I love, a beautiful home, success at work,” says Julien, the woe-begone adulterer in Mathieu Amalric’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel, “The Blue Room.” “I couldn’t be happier.”
Anyone who has been paying attention to the battering that supposedly happy marriages have been taking on the screen lately will recognize that this is a formula for disaster. Amalric, who also plays Julien with a gnomish gloom, gussies up this seeming retread of “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” with stylish visuals, a somber pace, a melodramatic soundtrack, and a narrative obliqueness that suggests depths that may or may not exist. Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.
The title refers to the rented room in which Julien and Esther (Stéphanie Cléau, who co-wrote the screenplay with Amalric) take time off from their spouses for languorous, graphic, and sumptuously photographed sex. It can also get a little rough, as Esther bites a chunk off Julien’s lip at one point. Perhaps he should see this as a warning that the wages of sin are more than just the cost of a room in a no-tell hotel. For now, though, the only problem is explaining the wound to his wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker); but she’s pallid and docile and doesn’t ask questions. Only his spunky daughter asks why, and he offers the typical bumped-into-a-post excuse.
The questions get a lot tougher after Julien is incarcerated and interrogated for an undisclosed crime. The details emerge gradually over the film’s slow-moving hour and a quarter, with Amalric inserting flashbacks as Julien undergoes grilling by a magistrate who doesn’t mind violating some of the basic rules of judicial procedure, at least as seen on American TV shows. Maybe courts operate differently in France, or the defense lawyers are lousier. Be that as it may, the mystery is pieced together not so much as a who-done-what but as an existential dialectic on ennui.
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Less obscure is Amalric’s obsession with the color in the title — it is more a film bleu than a film noir. Maybe he watched Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Blue” (1993) once too often, but, if so, he failed to learn from the late Polish auteur’s masterpiece the virtues of subtlety and restraint. In Amalric’s film, shades of blue are ubiquitous; even the wallpaper in the courtroom is a dingy azure. When applied so indiscriminately, the color doesn’t have much meaning other than as a design motif, serving as a contrast to the bleached interior of Julien’s house and the occasional dashes of orange and red (the latter most prominent in Esther’s mother-in-law’s dye job, another reason not to like her).
“Blue Room” demonstrates that, as a director, Amalric has begun to master the medium. Now he needs to work on expanding his palette.
More coverage:
- Mathieu Amalric’s ‘Blue Room’ period
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.