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.