What do a love affair and a murder have in common? Both take place behind closed doors, preferably at night. Both incur an intrusion of flesh, and both induce blood, sweat and sometimes tears. Both are supposedly a secret, the discovery of which entails complications, moral and legal, emotional and physical. A murder and an affair only achieve their full existential meaning when they remain forever a mystery, except to the people who know the seedy particulars of what was going on.
Stephanie Cleau, left, and Mathieu Amalric in a scene from The Blue Room.
At the centre of Mathieu Amalric’s La Chambre Bleue (The Blue Room), a French film that is showing at the 12th World Film Festival of Bangkok this weekend, is a love affair that leads to enigmatic deaths. Early on in this clipped, sultry, elegant murder mystery, we see the sweaty shoulder of Esther (Stephanie Cleau) as she lies on the lovemaking bed. Then we see a drop of blood falling on a white, crumpled sheet. The blood — the only time we see red in a movie whose engine is death — belongs to Julien (Amalric), bitten at the lips by his lover who, just like him, is married to someone else. “Can you spend your whole life with me?” Esther asks. At that second, Julien is caught naked, body and soul. The answer to that question will come back to him (and us) like inconsolably bad news.
Amalric is a prolific actor who, in his capacity as a director, surely knows how to put purring dread into a film. Working from a novel by Georges Simenon, he curdles familiar elements of the genre into a black, delicious mix — we hear lies, witness deceit and try to extract truth from fabrications (a feat at which we’re likely to fail). What shows his gift is Amalric’s deft handle on time — The Blue Room runs a scant 75 minutes, and the narrative has a kind of supple crisp as it goes back and forth between Julien’s final tryst with Esther, the subsequent deaths (which I’d rather not spell out), the police investigation and the courtroom trial that excites the small French town where the scandal takes place. Along the way, we have a symbolic red towel, a fate-sealing kiss on a lonely autumnal road, a psychological test-match and a few jars of poisoned jam.
“Life is different when you live it, and when go back over it after,” Julien tells his investigator. And that’s how the film’s shrewd wit toys with us: Julien belongs to the celebrated tradition of untrustworthy narrator. What he says to the police — the details of his relationship with Esther, for example, or his changing feeling towards his wife — doesn’t always correspond to what film lets us see on the screen. When he lies, the visuals don’t. Or maybe, as he claims, he recounts his own life differently than how he actually lived it. As we watch the affair unravel from this side, our vantage point as a spectator of this cruel sport gives us a privy to the “truth” of what Julien did or didn’t do — only for the film to slap us back into the realisation that in cinema, truth and lies get along swimmingly, and for our own pleasure.
- The Blue Room is showing tomorrow at 3.20pm and on Oct 21 at 6pm.
- The 12th World Film Festival of Bangkok runs SF World, CentralWorld until Oct 26. Visit www.worldfilmbkk.com.
