I do not believe every film has to have a “message.” As the old wisecrack goes, we have the Western Union for that.

However, I cannot help thinking what a movie is “all about” since I believe every film should have a “thematic unity.” It should be about “something.” A director really owes us that much for sitting for two hours in a darkened hall and paying nine dollars for his product.

When I ask that question for “Blue,” the first in the Polish film genius Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 3-Colors trilogy, an answer easily floats to the surface:

“Blue” is about the importance of choosing the right kind of renunciation in order to be free in life.

All renunciations are not equal and the one that really counts is the inner one.

When Julie de Courcy (played by a crystal-clear Juliette Binoche), the wife of a famous composer, loses her husband and daughter in a car accident caused by a leaking break-line, she tries to renounce the world by selling everything she and her late husband owned and moving to a small apartment in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Paris.

However, life does not stop just because she draws within and refuses to engage the world in any way. She even attempts to destroy all her husband’s musical transcript of the European Union Anthem that he was commissioned to finish. Her husband’s collaborator and her secret admirer Olivier (Benoît Régent) shoulders the task to complete the work despite Julie’s initial resistance.

As the film unfolds, we are treated to a philosophical essay in moving-pictures as to how life takes its course; how it is larger and more powerful (and even perhaps “more important”) than any one of us individually. And how it challenges us constantly to take a stand, or adjust our stand, or do nothing and suffer the consequences.

What do you do, for example, when a female rat delivers her litter in one of the rooms of your apartment? Do you get a cat and let him take care of the “problem”? Or do you choose to “live with” the new and unexpected development? What is life? And what license do we have in taking or perpetuating it?

Such moral dilemmas are dissected and displayed without a quick judgment in many sequences of this breathtaking film.

Julie shows the depth of her commitment to stay uninvolved with the matters of this world by refusing to get tangled up in conventional morality plays. That’s why she refuses to sign a petition condemning the “whore” living downstairs who is accepting customers from the other apartments in the building.

Later on, we are to learn that this young woman does what she does (also a pole dancer in a strip club) not because she is a loser but, by her own admission, she just plain likes it. Her only distress was to see her own father one day in the front row of the dance stage! (But mercifully he left the club before it was her turn to step up to the pole.)

Kieslowski’s tangled up real-life dilemmas do not have any ready-made solutions.

Julie thinks she is doing pretty well in the “renunciation” department and enjoys her false sense of “liberty” until she meets her real challenge – her husband left behind such a shocking secret for the unsuspecting Julie that she is either going to fall back onto her conventional defense mechanisms or bite the bullet and push forward. She somehow manages to do the latter.

With her opting for a tolerance and understanding that she never knew before in her life, we are also liberated in Julie’s character from our own petty bonds and calculations. Watching Julie at long last crack the twin-puzzles of “liberty” and “renunciation” gives a lot of clues to us as to how perhaps we can also live our own lives unencumbered with inner obstacles of our own creation.

That’s why it does not matter how long Kieslowski has been “dead.” His liberating influence and his courageous light of spirit will always be with us as long as movies are watched on one type of screen or another.

An unqualified 10 out of 10.

One of my “100 Films You Must See Before You Die”.

MOVIE TRIVIA: The three colors of the trilogy correspond to the three colors of the French flag, which in turn of course represent three important concepts that made France and Western Europe what they are today – liberty (Blue), equality (White), and fraternity (Red).