The Blue Room
La chambre bleue

The latest film from Mathieu Amalric--the actor (Venus in Fur, Quantum of Solace, A Christmas Tale) and director (On Tour, Le stade de Wimbledon, Mange ta soupe)--is an adaptation of the highly regarded mystery novella La chambre bleue by Georges Simenon. The story centers on an adulterous affair between a businessman (Amalric) and his obsessive, unstable lover (played by his real-life partner and co-screenwriter Stéphanie Cléau). The film has been marketed (both in American and Europe) as a neo-noir and compared with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Patricia Highsmith, and Roman Polanski. But aside from the surface similarities--the nonlinear, procedural structure, the crime-story mystery, the dramatic orchestral score by Grégoire Hetzel, and the 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio of classic Hollywood noirs of the 1940s--I don’t see how The Blue Room qualifies for these comparisons to noir cinema. For one thing, there is very little darkness. Everything is shot like a TV soap opera, with crystal clear, brightly lit images. The graphic sex scenes between Amalric and Cléau seem to intentionally shun all mystery or eroticism in favor of an almost medical depiction of naked bodies. Cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne (Adore, On Tour, Coco Before Chanel) uses the restrictively square frame to highlight the isolation of the individual characters, but the lack of shadows, and the extremely detailed depth of field feel completely counter to the sense of mystery a story like this cries out for. Perhaps Amalric and his collaborators are exploring something profound that I, as both a non-French speaker and a viewer ignorant of the source material, am missing, but I found this brief, almost casually-crafted picture so slight, I can barely remember a single scene or image a mere 48 hours later.