La note bleue (1991)

One of the late Andrzej Zulawski's unmade passion projects was a proposed short film consisting of seven episodes revolving around music. While discussing the project in 2012, Zulawski explained his idea of having each segment take place in a different European town, each utilizing a different type of music and its a shame the project never came to fruition as Zulawski clearly had an ear for music and how to use it to its maximum potential in film. Music was a major, sometimes crucial element to Zulawski's films. One of the most fruitful director/composer collaborations, the partnership between Zulawski and Andrzej Korzynski resulted in multiple memorable, very diverse scores, from the progressive rock-esque guitar heard in Diabel (1972), the pulsating, almost industrial percussion contrasted with lush string arrangements in Szamanka (1996) or the achingly beautiful piano based themes of Fidelity (2000) just to name a few. Of course, L’important c’est d’aimer (1975) wouldn't have nearly been the same without the music provided by Georges Delerue, sure to cause instantaneous weeping. At the end of the 80's and into the early 90's, Zulawski made two music centric films, the first being Boris Godunov (1989), an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's opera of the same name. Zulawski's next film, La note bleue, found him continuing on a musical path, this time in a much more personal fashion, its main subject being the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.

At heart, La note bleue (The Blue Note) is centered around the contentious romance between the perpetually ill Chopin (Janusz Olejniczak) and French writer George Sand (Marie-France Pisier) during their relationships last days, one of the many complications being Sand's engaged daughter Solange (Sophie Marceau) being madly in love with Chopin. The film also highlights several side characters as the entire film is set at Sand's countryside estate where several notable guests have gathered, the likes of which include painter Eugène Delacroix, writer Ivan Turgenev, Wojciech Grzymała, a Polish soldier and friend of Chopin, Polish countess Laura Czosnowska, writer Andre Dumas Jr. and Auguste Clésinger, an eccentric sculptor who arrives to win the affection of Solange.

La note bleue is often compared to the musical biopics of Ken Russell, though interestingly the film shares several similarities with another Russell, non music film, Gothic (1986), Russell's interpretation of the night Mary Shelley envisioned the story of Frankenstein. Like Gothic, La note bleue features a gathering of eccentric, creative personalities at a large countryside estate, but more importantly, the central figures in each film, Shelly and Chopin, are both preoccupied with death, in the case of Shelley its the death of her child while Chopin constantly obsesses over his own death. Whereas Gothic is a full-blown horror film, La note bleue “wears the genre mask” as Zulawski would have put it, with its eye-popping baroque painting based visual design and occasionally drifting in and out of horror and fantastique territory with the sudden appearances of imposing and colorful shrouded, phantom-esque stilted figures, a fire nymph like creature and satyrs conversing amongst themselves, none of which are ever acknowledged by any of the characters nor is their appearances ever explained. The film also concludes with a memorable, phantasmagoric puppet show featuring the cast detailing their futures while holding their life-like puppet counterparts. Just as Boris Godunov would have made complete sense as a Zulawski original script had it not been based on source material, the same could be said of La note bleue with the breakdown of Chopin and Sand's perfectly suited for Zulawski's peculiar brand of melodrama and Marceau's hyperactive performance the right vehicle to showcase Solange's l'amour fou for Chopin.         

Naturally the soundtrack is comprised of Chopin music however Zulawski does something interesting in certain scenes by having Olejniczak, an actual pianist, playing Chopin at the piano while other Chopin pieces are layered overtop on the soundtrack. Incredibly, not one piece clashes with the other and whenever it occurs both pieces of much sound strangely in sync and naturally the music is one of the films main selling points along with the previously mentioned look of the film. From a purely technical audio/visual standpoint, the film may very well be Zulawski's finest. Like Chopin and Zulawski, Olejniczak is also Polish which is one of the main reasons why the film could again be considered one of Zulawski's most personal. Chopin was very much an ex-pat, and never returned to Poland after his settling in Paris in 1831, though he would never consider himself French and as documented in the film, felt a longing for his homeland throughout his life. While Zulawski did return to live and work in Poland, drawing the ire of many in the process, there are some parallels to be drawn in that Zulawski was more or less “exiled” from Poland following the banning of Diabel and worked in France for the majority of his directorial career, so he clearly felt some sort of comradery with Chopin which led to La note bleue being one of Zulawski's most heartfelt endeavors.   

Boris Godunov (1989)

Given the heightened, very theatrical elements of his films, its a curious thing why Andrzej Zulawski never directed for the theater. The theater makes several appearances throughout Zulawski's filmography, at times even playing a major part in the story. In Zulawski's second feature Diabel (1972), the protagonist encounters an eccentric traveling theater troupe performing Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Bard factors in prominently in L'important c'est d'aimer (1975), where Romy Schneider finds herself in a particularity histrionic take on Richard III with Klaus Kinski as the star/director. Although inspired by Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, Anton Chekov's play The Seagull takes precedent in L'amour braque (1985), culminating in an maniacal reading from Sophie Marceau. A major theatrical comparison is often drawn between Zulawski and Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski, who's intense acting training methods, known as the “Stanislavski system”, one of the earliest forms of method acting, where performers are pushed to the brink both mentally and psychically in order to ensure the most honest performance, was a method Zulawski often employed, perhaps most infamously with Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981) and Iwona Petry in Szamanka (1996). It was only appropriate that in 1989, Zulawski turned to the stage, the opera to be prescience, with Boris Godunov, an adaptation of both the play by Alexander Pushkin and the opera by Modest Mussorgsky, an unusual film even by Zulawski standards and his most underseen film.

Following the death of Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, the chamberlain to the former leader, is appointed to the role of Czar. Although highly popular with the Russian people, Godunov's reign is wrought with both political and personal difficulties including a monk who claims that he is in fact Dmitriy Ivanovich, the dead son of Ivan and rightful heir to the throne who sets out on a campaign to overtake Russia with Marina, an ambitious princess. Godunov's inner circle is also plotting against him at the behest of Prince Shuyskiy, a power hungry adviser to the Czar. Worse yet, Godunov is plagued with visions of the ghost of a dead child, a child Godunov was rumored to have murdered, a rumor Shuyskiy is quick to use to his advantage.

Perhaps second only to Zulawski's On the Silver Globe (1977/88) in terms of ambition and scope, Boris Godunov is certainly a strange beast. While faithful to both the play and the opera which its based, not to mention the history of its source material, the film is still a quintessential Zulawski film, loaded with Zulawski's defining peculiarities so even if the film hadn't been an adaptation it would still make complete sense in the context of Zulawski's overall cannon. While there is quite a bit to unpack story wise, and its inevitable that many will get lost along the way, the film is a great example of when getting lost isn't necessarily a bad thing. Although some of the plot points that might take multiple viewings to fully digest are incredibly important, this is again a Zulawski film and like the rest of his output, the amplified emotion of the film strikes just as big a subconscious chord and the film is easy to get lost in anyhow considering the music, which is nothing short of mesmerizing as are the lavish sets and costumes. Among the films many curiosities are a few comedic bits involving food which Zulawski would repeat again in his follow-up film La note bleue (1991), but perhaps the most fascinating are the instances of explicit fourth wall breaking with Zulawski fully embracing the artifice, pulling the camera back revealing the action being performed on stage, showing the audience and the orchestra and simultaneously the filming of his own movie. 

An interesting moment early on the in the film sees a guard dressed in modern Soviet military garb appear in the midst of the period setting and given that the film was made in 1989, a year which saw several revolutions put an end to communist oppression in many eastern European countries, its not a stretch to speculate Zulawski drawing a parallel between the historical events of the story and what was happening throughout the world at the time of shooting. Its also important to note that the film features Mussorgsky's original score from the opera (naturally shorted due to time constraints) which is a rare occurrence in performances of the opera with a revised score written in 1872. In fact, the opera as a whole has been re-written several times since its original incarnation with performances of both versions prepared by Mussorgsky being scarce and as things of this nature normally go, the originality of Mussorgsky's initial score, which for whatever reason was thought to need “corrections”, hence all the revisions, is now considered highly innovative. Funny and more that a bit frustrating to think how Pushkin's original play, which fascinatingly was barred from actual performance until 35 years after its initial publication, ultimately became his most well known work while Zulawski's film remains his most obscure when it should in fact be recognized for the brilliant, singular achievement that it is.