Who's killing whom?

Mathieu Amalric’s "The Blue Room"

In
6 minute read
It starts with adulterous lovers: Stéphanie Cléau and Mathieu Amalric in "The Blue Room" (© 2014 - IFC Films)
It starts with adulterous lovers: Stéphanie Cléau and Mathieu Amalric in "The Blue Room" (© 2014 - IFC Films)

Georges Simenon was the Balzac of the 20th century.

Balzac tried to get all of post-Napoleonic French society into his series of novels The Human Comedy. That society was defined by commerce and represented the triumph of the bourgeoisie enshrined by the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

Simenon similarly looked for the signal characteristic of his own time. He found it in crime — not crime for profit, as in capitalist commerce, but crime as transgression, as evidence of the sin at the core of human character. His great detective hero, Inspector Maigret, became a kind of confessor of the 20th-century conscience. But it is in the non-Maigret novels that Simenon’s existential bleakness emerges most chillingly: when crime has nothing to confess to.

The Blue Room is one of those novels. In bringing it to the screen — and also playing its principal character — the French actor-director Mathieu Amalric has created one of the best of all the many Simenon adaptations, one that cuts close to the bone-dry style of the master himself. The room in question is the place of assignation between two adulterous lovers, Julien (Amalric) and Esther (Stéphanie Cléau). Like many of Simenon’s protagonists, they live in a small rural town. Julien, a self-made man, sells agricultural equipment and lives in a rather aggressively modern house with his wife Delphine (Léa Drucker) and their small daughter. Esther is a pharmacist’s daughter-in-law and works in the family shop.

The film begins with the lovers in bed. You get a little body action between them, but the gist of the affair is indicated by the tangled white sheets on which cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne’s camera lingers. You settle back for another French tale of passion. But that’s not what you get.

Disrupted narrative

A series of rapid flashbacks dislodge you from the initial setup and disrupt, Rashomon-style, the narrative progression one instinctively looks for. Something bad has happened to Julien, we realize, and he is being questioned by the authorities. It takes a while for us to figure out that a double murder has (probably) been committed: Esther’s husband and Julien’s wife are both dead, and both have died the same way, through poison. The police are, naturally, building a case for conspiracy. The lovers’ relationship is known, since they’ve used a hotel room. It’s the stuff of French novels a thousand times over, and policemen are trained not to use their imaginations. Like moviegoers, they look for the most obvious explanation.

When we first meet Julien and Esther, their passion for each other is at its height. Only gradually do we learn that Esther has been the seducer and remains the dominant partner. When she muses about what it would be like to be inseparably united, Julien none-too-romantically remarks that they would probably get used to each other, i.e., become as bored as any other married couple. He’s middle-aged, balding, and a bit scrawny, in short what the French call un homme moyen sensuel, a man of middling libido, temporarily ensnared, but with no interest in breaking up his home and especially of wounding the daughter on whom he dotes.

The police, however, require him to be something quite different. And we, too, are obliged to play detective with them. Since we see the film from Julien’s point of view, and since he not only steadfastly maintains his innocence but seems bewildered by the turn of events, we’re inclined to believe that, while Esther may be guilty of a murder plot, he is not.

Experts disagree

But Amalric doesn’t make it that easy for us. Esther’s husband has been ill, and his death initially arouses no suspicion. While one expert testifies that he has indeed been poisoned, another says that it can’t be proved. Esther herself, on the stand, readily confesses that she wished her husband dead but denies that she did anything to bring his death about. She confesses motive, she has had opportunity, but there’s no direct evidence that she has acted, and the experts, as usual, disagree.

As for Julien, we see a scene in which he and Delphine are ducking each other in the water at a seaside vacation to which he’s invited her. Suddenly, he begins to push her head repeatedly under. She breaks free and swims away, and later, on shore, she huddles in fright, obviously having feared for her life. Has this simply been a momentary temptation on Julien’s part? Or is it actually part of a plot after all? Delphine is poisoned through a plum jelly she orders by mail, and Julien himself picks up the package, which has passed through Esther’s hands, to bring to her. Doesn’t he know what it contains? But by this time his interest in Esther has waned, and, even if he were still bent on killing Delphine, why would he use Esther’s assistance or expose his intentions to her? Contrariwise, is the plot actually Esther’s alone, and is she trying to trap — even frame — Julien himself?

No neat solution

The film’s ending suggests that one of these options is the most plausible, but it leaves the question hanging: This is not a detective story where the case will be neatly solved. Simenon’s point is that love can be no less lethal than hate and that distinguishing the two emotions is no simple matter, even to the bearer. Similarly, guilt or innocence is a function — or a fiction — of justice systems, not of the human heart. The truth of that small, grenade-shaped object is rarely yes or no, and if it is forced to choose between them, the firing pin is apt to be released.

Amalric, whose acting credits include The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and who’s played a James Bond villain in Quantum of Solace, seems to shrink before our eyes with each frame of film as the trap closes around Julien. The impression of this is reinforced by the use of Academy ratio filming, the format of most sound films in the pre-Cinemascope age but now rarely used. Stéphanie Cléau, Amalric’s real-life partner, is darkly determined, and Léa Drucker is the wife seduced in another way, by the fatal routine of a marriage from which she no longer asks much. The film’s spare elegance and noir vision reminds one of Chabrol, and even, a little, of Bresson. It is also quintessentially French in its complete absence of sentiment. In American film, there’s always the sense that the world should be a little better than it is. The French have no interest in rainbows. Their skies are gray, and they prefer them that way.

What, When, Where

The Blue Room. A film directed by Mathieu Amalric; written by Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau; based on a novel by Georges Simenon. At the Ritz at the Bourse; closed November 13, 2014.

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