The Blue Room

This chill­ing minia­ture from actor and some-time direc­tor Math­ieu Amal­ric, adapt­ed from a 1964 nov­el by Georges Simenon, dis­pens­es with the screw-turn­ing mechan­ics of the tra­di­tion­al mur­der mys­tery to ask one ques­tion: what is it like to feel guilty? In fact, the ques­tion is more like, feel­ing guilty is awful, but how awful?

Amalric’s Julien Gahyde, a goatee’d, appar­ent­ly decent farm­ing machin­ery rep, meets intox­i­cat­ing, sex­u­al­ly vora­cious pharmacist’s wife, Esther (Stéphanie Cléau), in a hotel room whose walls are paint­ed a calm­ing shade of deep blue. A tac­it pact to dis­pense with their cur­rent part­ners turns sour, as the idyll of the blue room is revealed as a flash­back to hap­pi­er times. In the present, Julien is being ques­tioned for a crime we must assume is linked to the pact.

The par­tic­u­lars of the case are revealed in curt but evoca­tive fash­ion, Amal­ric enhanc­ing this sim­ple yarn by allow­ing his cam­era to pick up salient side details and obser­va­tions. A drop of jam falling onto a lap­top acts as a reminder of a par­tic­u­lar­ly wild liai­son where unchecked pas­sion leads to mild blood-let­ting. A mag­is­trate removes a pic­ture of his wife from his desk while ques­tion­ing Julian, per­haps to pre­vent rub­bing salt into the weep­ing wound, or maybe as an admis­sion of his own guilt. A typ­ist tak­ing down the con­fes­sions is shocked by what she’s hear­ing. Amal­ric drifts through the film with a stul­ti­fied gaze, as if the land­scape is scat­tered with reminders of his sins.

The film sug­gests that true love requires a dras­tic affir­ma­tion, that it’s not enough to just make a sim­ple deci­sion to move on with a new phase of life. There’s an under­tow of con­ser­vatism, though, as it claims that infi­deli­ty can cause suf­fer­ing in ways which can sel­dom be antic­i­pat­ed. Maybe it’s that we’re ill equipped to respond to our own depres­sion in the hon­ourable cause of main­tain­ing the illu­sion of happiness.