Three Colours: Blue

Julie survives the car crash that kills her husband, a celebrated composer, and their young daughter. In the weeks after, she sells the family house, gives away or destroys what she owns, breaks contact with friends, and takes an anonymous flat in Paris. She wants no reminders, no obligations, and above all no music, and she sets about arranging a life in which nothing can reach her.

Kieslowski floods the image with blue and lets Zbigniew Preisner's score swell and then cut to silence, so that mourning becomes something heard as much as seen. Binoche carries long, near motionless close-ups in which feeling passes across a still face. Critics read the film through liberty, the first term of the republican motto, taken here as the bleak freedom of a woman who has lost everything that bound her.

For the clinician, the film tracks an attempt at total severance and shows why it fails. Music, a lawsuit, her husband's pregnant mistress, and small acts of kindness keep drawing her back. It studies the defences built against loss and their slow, partial collapse.