**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Mathieu Amalric/Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Lea Drucker and Stephanie Cleau
Based on the novel of the same name, The Blue Room is dark and sensuous, with a sophisticated story structure that uses a suspect's deposition as a kind of narration.
Director and star Mathieu Amalric plays Julien Gahyde; a successful manager of a farm machinery company. When we first see him, he is handcuffed and giving testimony to police. We haven't the slightest idea why but as the story proceeds, his situation becomes clearer.
We also see him early on in the naked embrace of a woman not his wife as their bodies lazily entwine. In their deceptively casual conversation that follows their passionate love-making, his lover, Esther Despierre (Stephanie Cleau) coaxes a declaration of love from him. The lovers even draw blood, as Esther bites Julien on the lip, leaving a small wound. Sometime later, when Julien steps to the window, he sees Esther's husband approaching on the street below. He dresses hastily then flees the hotel; driving home hurriedly.
Waiting at his comfortable, modern home are his wife Delphine (Lea Drucker) and his daughter, who offer mundane and safe domesticity. It is difficult to tell whether Delphine suspects Julien but if she does, she doesn't betray it.
As the story progresses, Julien's testimony reveals details about how Julien and Esther became involved. Having known Esther and her husband in their school days, she and Julien find themselves living in the same town. The lovers often see one another in the pharmacy her husband owns, which makes it difficult for Julian and Delphine to avoid Esther.
From further testimony, we learn the two devised a code by which Esther hangs a red towel outside the blue room where their trysts are consummated, to let Julien know when she is ready to see him.
The further the narrative reaches, the more we see Julien's tortured ambivalence; his love for his wife and daughter discourages him from seeing Esther, who attracts and repels him. As their relationship becomes known to the community, Esther's husband dies from a seizure that may or may not have been caused to poisoning, which leads the community to look upon the lovers suspiciously.
After the trial commences, we learn Julien's wife has also died (hence his arrest) by eating poisoned jam, which we often see her enjoying early on in the film. As the lovers arrive for the trial, a media circus erupts while a hostile crowd gathers outside the courthouse.
But the luridness of the crime isn't dwelt upon; after-all, this is French cinema. Instead, Amalric captures Julien and Esther's emotional and psychic states. How Julien sees the two women is the real focus of the film. How do the women contrast? What elusive quality does Esther offer that alternately holds Julien captive and repulses him? While Julien and Esther draw blood, both literally and figuratively from their relationship, his marriage to Delphine is by contrast bloodless and sadly lacking in passion.
Amalric handles the complexities of the narrative skillfully and seamlessly. We're slowly lured into the baffling story, mystified at how a passionate affair could lead to a character's criminal deposition. Amalric keeps us waiting patiently for the mystery to be laid bare but maintains our emotional involvement. I think Henri-Georges Clouzot; the great director of Diabolique would have really appreciated The Blue Room.
Amalric is always a fascinating actor; his wide, alert eyes are very expressive and are a character unto themselves. Both Stephanie Cleau and Lea Drucker compliment Amalric's performance beautifully; the former's queasily single-minded love for Julien leaves one feeling a small measure of revulsion while the latter's stoic resolution stimulates questions about how much she knows about her husband's infidelity and why she endures it.
The Blue Room is an engaging psychological drama but it also has its sensual moments. Amalric's film is both small and behemoth-like; it eschews sensationalism and operatic hyperbole to tell an emotionally rich story. These people aren't beautiful, romantically sentimental images on a screen; they are real people; ones markedly different than the apparitions who inhabit the contrived world of cinematic manufacture.
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