Actors: Juliette Binoche and Toni Collette
Director: Kielowski (France); Sue Brooks(Australian), Producer:

The two movies I had seen recently were on relationships too. “BLUE” by Kielowski, a part of his trilogy, Red, White and Blue and “ A Japanese Story”. Blue was centred on Juliette Binoche who gives a marvelously contained performance as a woman who loses her husband and five year old daughter in a car accident, herself surviving the accident. Her husband was a renowned composer who was putting the finishing touches to a concert for the unification of Europe. Binoche withdraws from the world, leaves everything behind and moves into a new apartment to begin a life of anonymity and almost of non existence as she goes through each day, living yet among the dead. Her husband’s partner who had been in love with her attempts to finish the concerto in a seemingly futile attempt to get her to take it up as she had apparently been responsible for writing much of her husband’s scores, albeit unheralded and unrecognized. Meanwhile she continues to live with quiet dignity only to discover that her husband had been in love with another woman and that she is carrying his baby. She deals with the realization with the same serenity that she had earlier and gives her former house that belonged to her husband to his lover, decides to finish the score for the concert and goes back to the man who loves her. The words for the concert are “You may have everything else in the world but if you don’t have love, you have nothing.” It’s a beautifully crafted film. Yet does she have love, love for her husband or love for her husband’s partner who loves her?

A Japanese story stars Toni Collette as a geologist who has developed a new software. A Japanese man visits Australia to explore the business his father has stakes and an interest in and wishes to go deep into the desert. Toni ( Sandy) enforce has to take him around at which he ends up believing she is his driver. He is standoffish initially and lands them in a soup when their Land Rover gets enmeshed in the sand deep inroad in the Western Australian desert, a harsh landscape where noone lives and noone comes. The camaraderie that builds up between them as they get out of their predicament ends up in their falling in love, the emotionally contained almost feminine Japanese man who comes alive in the Australian bush and the mid 30s Australian rugged woman used to her solitary lifestyle. He, however, is married with two kids and the family obligations are there to stay. As she jumps into the water in a pond out somewhere in the Pilbara desert, he follows suit only to miscalculate and dive head first, disappearing in front of her eyes. You keep expecting him to emerge behind her as if playing a prank but no, he’s dead. It is a poignant moment as she calls Hiromitsu, Hiromitsu” desperately trying to call him back to life as it were. One moment alive and vibrant and the next lifeless. She has to cart his body back to civilization alone and after that come to terms with what happened by meeting his wife who comes to collect the body. Some understanding dawns on the wife when she sees the photographs of her beaming husband with the grinning Sandy yet she leaves Sandy in peace accepting what occurred.

Both movies are on relationships and chance encounters and acceptance. Again on the transientness of everything, love, life and being. They say in Zen Buddhism to accept oneself as you are first and be yourself. In the real world that is often difficult to do and people go around with masks often not even realising who they really are. Did the husband in both movies hurt their wives by falling in love with someone else? While it may be better avoided, are they hurting their wives and families or does one hurt oneself . Why should one get hurt- because they feel slighted? As I said are relationships that easy to define?