THREE COLOURS: BLUE

THREE COLOURS: BLUE (Director Krzystof Kieslowski. Starring Juliette Binoche).

After Ten Commandments, Three Colours: Blue is the first in a new series of films form Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski. Perhaps the ultimate in European art film-makers, his movies are shot eliptically, end bafflingly, delight in the incongruous and surreal and never miss an opportunity for female nudity. And he has an unpronounceable name to boot.

His new series, produced and shot in France, draws for unity (his production notes inform us) on the colours of the French revolution (blue, white and red) and their corresponding themes (liberty, equality, fraternity), though the connections might best be described as arbitrary, unnecessary and airy fairy.

The film is shot through with blue, to be sure, but then his last, The Double Life of Veronique was imbued with green. This suggests to me less a connection between colours and ideas than a fascination with filters and an inspired way to put a three picture deal together.

In Derek Jarman's recent film Blue the colour was a metaphor for impending oblivion. The connection between the colour blue and the idea of liberty may be equally spurious, but then Kieslowski has an unusual notion of liberty anyway, and one that ties in neatly enough with Jarman's. Not for him the lofty ideals of universal freedom as evoked by the fathers of the revolution. Liberty here is the freedom from connections, the complete isolation of a person from her previous life: friends, family, places and even memories. If the morbidly melancholic feeling it evokes represents liberty, then give me death.

Juliette Binoche plays Julie, who awakes in hospital to learn that her composer husband and infant daughter died in a car crash. She is the sole survivor, and the rest of the film concentrates on the survival of her soul. She attempts suicide but is halted by a vigilant nurse. Instead she attempts to cut herself off from everything but, in random, uncontrollable ways, the world keeps intruding on her grief and slowly draws her back in.

With little sense of time, and a dislocated sense of space, Blue might best be described as cryptic - if you could just work out what the puzzle was supposed to be. So much appears random, yet in the hand of the film-maker you cannot help but suspect some kind of divine order. Kieslowski imbues even the inanimate with a sense of meaning. His idiosyncratic eye, dwelling on surfaces, reflections and odd details, and assured pacing lend a quiet sense of profundity to everything he contemplates.

Kieslowski came to prominence with his series Dekalog (Ten Commandments) and its offshoot movies A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love. While these were rooted in tangible social issues, his subsequent cinematic work has drifted into the remote realm of a kind of personal mysticism. It is his triumph as a director to make them so compulsively watchable, and his triumph as an artist to demand such subjective interpretation.

Compulsive but baffling viewing: Fellini's not even buried yet and he already has an heir.