The blue room (2014)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The blue room |
| Original title | La chambre bleue |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 2014 |
| length | 71 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Mathieu Amalric |
| script |
Stéphanie Cléau Mathieu Amalric |
| production | Paulo Branco |
| music | Grégoire Hetzel |
| camera | Christophe Beaucarne |
| cut | François Gédigier |
| occupation | |
| |
The Blue Room is a 2014 French crime film directed by Mathieu Amalric . It is based on a novel by Georges Simenon .
action
Julien Gahyde will be tried. Only with time does it become clear what the reason is.
Julien works as an agricultural machinery dealer, is married to Delphine and has a young daughter, Suzanne, with her. The pharmacist Esther Despierre, whom he knew from his youth, married one of Julien's schoolmates, the always sickly Nicolas. Now Esther sees Julien again when she got stuck with the car on a little traveled route. She accuses him of kissing all women in the past, except her. Now she makes him kiss her - the beginning of a passionate affair. They meet at irregular intervals in the blue room of a hotel in the following months. Esther starts to bite him while making love, for which Julien can talk his way out in front of Delphine. Esther's question whether he could imagine a life by her side, Julien replies in the affirmative.
During a meeting with Esther, Julien sees Nicolas who seems to be approaching the hotel. He flees. With his family he goes on vacation to the sea and he doesn't contact Esther after the vacation either. He receives letters from her with short notes, which he increasingly perceives as threatening. One day Julien learns that Nicolas has had a seizure and has passed away. Although Nicolas was seriously ill, Julien's death does not seem natural. When he receives a letter from Esther with the text "À toi!" ("Well you!"), He is shocked. Like all other letters before, he destroys this one too. Some time later, at Delphine's request, he was supposed to pick up medicine for his daughter from the pharmacy where Esther works. Nicolas' mother, who owns the pharmacy, hands him a pack of plum jam that had arrived for his wife. Before that, she can be seen in a flashback in an adjoining room, hiding the opened box with the jam and taking off a pair of rubber gloves. Esther just greets him. Later in the court hearing, the pharmacist will say that the box was unopened and undamaged.
Julien delivers the jam at home and goes on an appointment. So he plans to sell his company if there is a good offer. When he returns, the house is full of police. His wife died of poisoned plum jam. Julien is arrested.
Before the examining magistrate, his vacation is understood as a deception. A comparison with Esther, who doubts Delphine's love for Julien, ends with Julien being violent. The long period of time until he has delivered the jam is taken as an indication that Julien poisoned the jam. Esther, on the other hand, testifies in court that she did not kill her husband but did so to live with Julien. In the end, Julien and Esther are found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Esther says with a smile to Julien that she has not been divided. So they leave the courtroom.
production
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The blue room is based on the 1964 novel La chambre bleue by Georges Simenon, which was previously considered impossible to film. The film was shot in the old-fashioned Academy Ratio format (1.37: 1 or 4: 3). As a result, the film appears “compressed, cramped, and at the same time the film comes close to its characters”, said Die Zeit .
The shooting took place in July and November 2013 at the Palais de Justice in Bobigny , in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne , La Flèche , Luché-Pringé and Les Sables-d'Olonne (holiday scenes). The courthouse was found in the Palais de justice de Baugé in Baugé-en-Anjou . Dorothée Guiraud created the costumes, Christophe Offret designed the film . Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau, who play secret lovers in the film, are actually a couple; it was Cléau's first major film role.
The Blue Room premiered on May 16, 2014 as part of the Cannes International Film Festival . The film opened in French cinemas on May 17, 2014, where it was seen by around 154,000 viewers. The film was shown in cinemas in Germany from April 2, 2015, and was also released on DVD in September 2015.
Reviews
Amalric manages in the shortness of the film "to build up an arc of tension that certainly brings back memories of Christopher Nolan's amnesia thriller ' Memento ' here and there ," said Die Welt and compared Amalric's Julien with Franz Kafka's Josef K. Amalric had "in his story built in a lot of small barbs, which actually make up its whole charm, ”said Deutschlandfunk . The film is "exciting from start to finish: not even because of the Whodunit , but because the past and present, overlapping in image and sound, are constantly pushed into one another: an act of love, an act of memory," wrote the Tagesspiegel .
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , on the other hand, found that “the bed scenes [...] are almost the only thing that works properly in 'The Blue Room'. [...] A deadly love story like this one needs two actors who are determined to do everything, also to embarrass themselves rather than to dim the emotions of their characters. Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau, on the other hand, only play with madness, they don't play it off. "
Awards
The blue room ran in Cannes in the competition for the "Un certain regard" prize. Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau were nominated for the César in the category Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 .
Web links
- The blue room in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for The Blue Room . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2015 (PDF; test number: 150 883 K).
- ↑ a b Josef Schnelle: Power, pain and passion . deutschlandfunk.de, April 3, 2015.
- ↑ Christian Buß : Erotic thriller "The Blue Room": Lust, a labyrinth . spiegel.de, April 2, 2015.
- ↑ Kaspar Heinrich: When did a whisper become a death threat? zeit.de, April 1, 2015.
- ↑ a b Felix Zwinzscher: What really happened during the love game in the hotel? welt.de, April 3, 2015.
- ↑ Box Office France on allocine.fr
- ↑ Jan Schulz-Ojala: Sex and Death in St. Justin tagesspiegel.de, April 1, 2015.
- ↑ Andreas Kilb: The phantoms of the tractor seller faz.net, April 2, 2015.