La chambre bleue

Julien (Mathieu Amalric) lives with his wife and their child in a smart bungalow in provincial France. He’s having an affair with Esther (Stéphanie Cléau), a pharmacist who is also married, they meet secretly in a hotel room with blue wallpaper. The gaping void between the experience of their sexual passion and its retrospective dissection forms the central structuring element of this coolly directed adaptation of a 1964 crime novel by Georges Simenon that is transposed to the present and links together different levels of time: the police investigations and interrogations in custody in the present and flashbacks. A red towel, postcards, and jam all play an important role in this dark story, whose rapid cuts, dramatic music and 1:1.33 aspect ratio are reminiscent of economically-narrated genre film. (bik)