In praise of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s sug­ar cube

One of the most famous shots from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Tril­o­gy is that of a sug­ar cube absorb­ing cof­fee. While it lasts just five sec­onds, this sim­ple close-up from Three Colours: Blue embod­ies the expe­ri­ence of space and real­i­ty for the pro­tag­o­nist, Julie (Juli­ette Binoche). More sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it acts as a metaphor for the film’s mes­sage – this is a film about find­ing per­son­al lib­er­ty in grief, trau­ma and loss, by observ­ing the rela­tion­ship between emo­tion­al detach­ment and sub­jec­tive intimacy.

Three Colours: Blue opens with a car crash that claims the lives of Julie’s hus­band, a famous com­pos­er, and her daugh­ter. The remain­der of the film chron­i­cles her sub­se­quent mourn­ing, fol­lowed by attempts to rebuild her life. As with much of Kieślowski’s work, the cam­era focus­es on the character’s tac­tile envi­ron­ment. Tex­tures and char­ac­ter­is­tics of every­day objects are brought so close into focus that the rest of the world sim­ply fades into the background.

Around 50 min­utes in, Julie meets Oliv­er (Benoît Régent) in a cof­fee shop, a col­lab­o­ra­tor of her husband’s who con­fess­es his love for her. In her ambiva­lence Julie does not react to his advances. Instead, she del­i­cate­ly places a sug­ar cube in her cof­fee and waits for the liq­uid to be absorbed before drop­ping it. Mas­ter­ful­ly shot by Sła­womir Idzi­ak, this snap­shot of an every­day action may appear insignif­i­cant, but on clos­er inspec­tion it demon­strates how each scene in the film is care­ful­ly linked to its core themes.

In Dominique Rabourdin’s doc­u­men­tary Krzysztof Kieślows­ki: A Les­son in Cin­e­ma, Kieślows­ki him­self exam­ines an indi­vid­ual scene from each film in the tril­o­gy. By decon­struct­ing both the tech­ni­cal aspects and the mean­ing of each scene, he offers a glimpse into his film­mak­ing style. Of all the scenes in Three Colours: Blue he could have cho­sen from, Kieślows­ki zeroes in on these five sec­onds. This shot, he says, rep­re­sents how Julie is ​“try­ing to con­tain, to put a lid on her world and imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment”. In this fleet­ing moment in the cof­fee shop, ​“only the sug­ar cube mat­ters, and she inten­tion­al­ly focus­es on it to shut out all the things she doesn’t accept”.

In her grief, noth­ing mat­ters out­side of this enclosed space. Not the oth­er cus­tomer or the man who has just opened his heart to her. By dis­lo­cat­ing Julie from her sur­round­ings and focus­ing on a moment of self-reflec­tion, Kieślows­ki draws the view­er into a point-of-view per­spec­tive. The use of shal­low focus, form­ing a sil­hou­ette around the cof­fee cup, sig­ni­fies her pro­tec­tive shield against the loss that has engulfed her, and as the sug­ar cube slow­ly changes colour Julie’s emo­tion­al bat­tle becomes clear; she must relearn how to inter­act with the world around her again.

Kieślows­ki knew that this shot had to be exact­ly five sec­onds. Any less and it wouldn’t allow us to reflect on the protagonist’s sit­u­a­tion. Any longer and it wouldn’t hold our atten­tion. In order to find the right bal­ance, the direc­tor asked his pro­duc­tion assis­tant to test all dif­fer­ent kinds of sug­ar cube in order to find one that would soak up the cof­fee in pre­cise­ly five sec­onds. Why go to all this trou­ble for such a brief amount of screen time?

In his own words, Kieślows­ki want­ed to show that ​“everybody’s life is wor­thy of scruti­ny, has its secrets and dra­mas”. To con­vey Julie’s per­son­al reac­tion to loss, the cam­era must ren­der her at a dis­tance from real­i­ty. Kieślows­ki believes this is how screen and view­er can inter­act. A sim­ple five-sec­ond shot, designed and con­struct­ed with the view­er in mind, demon­strates how we can be drawn into a character’s milieu, and how even the small­est detail can pro­found­ly impact our view­ing experience.