Blue
The first in the trilogy, Blue, follows Julie (Juliette Binoche) who loses her composer husband and daughter in a car accident. She must then come to terms with her loss and find reason for her life. Nick James wrote in Blue: Bare Necessities:
It’s also generally said that Blue is an antitragedy, just as White is an anticomedy and Red an antiromance, Blue’s idea of freedom is willfully perverse.
Of central importance to the film is its musical element – Julie's late husband was a world-renowned composer, and his widow has a love-hate relationship with his last unfinished symphony. Preisner wrote the film's exquisite score, which forms a strong backbone to the narration. In one scene, Julie is sitting in a cafe while some music is wafting in the background. She is having a conversation with a man who is seemingly intently listening to the music, which turns out to be music Julie's husband had written, played by a street musician outside.
The scene also highlights another pivotal component of the film: Sławomir Idziak's delicate cinematography. In Blue, he used several blue filters over the lens, immersing the film in a blue haze.
In this film, blue symbolises all sorts of emotions and experiences, sometimes conflicting,. 'Kieślowski's camera makes the colours into rich, intentional screens to receive our projected feelings.
Despite the fact that the cafe scene is depicted in normal colours, one very important motif is a sugar cube being held by Julie over a cup of coffee. The cube slowly absorbs the liquid, turning from white into brown. She then drops the cube into the coffee. This seemingly innocuous mis-en-scene, shows how Kieślowski was not only interested in the story as moved along by the dialogue (written together with Piesiewicz), but takes time to show such intricacies. Kieślowski said in an interview:
What does this obsession with close-ups mean?. We're simply trying to show the heroine's world from her point of view. To show that these little things, things that are near her, by focusing on them, in order to demonstrate that the rest doesn't matter to her. She's trying to contain, to put a lid on her world, and on her immediate environment.
Blue won a number of international awards, most notably the Best Film at 1993's Venice Film Festival and Best European Film at that year's Goya Awards.
White
The French value of 'equality' is described in the story of Polish hairdresser Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who marries French Dominique (Julie Delpy) and moves to Paris. The marriage eventually disintegrates, the two divorce, forcing Karol to a life on the streets, and eventually move back to Poland.