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France · 2014
Rated R · 1h 15m
Director Mathieu Amalric
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Léa Drucker, Stéphanie Cléau, Laurent Poitrenaux
Genre Drama, Crime, Thriller
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Every now and then Julien and Esther meet in the blue room of a local hotel to make passionate, illicit love to each other. Julien considers it to be a fling, but when he leaves on vacation with his family, he starts to receive strange notes from Esther. Suddenly, Julien and Esther's secret world starts to infringe on their personal lives and the lives around them...
In telling his story, Amalric is greatly aided by his ace cinematographer, Christophe Beaucarne, whose images pick up on a great many tiny but telling details, as if life were a mosaic composed of an almost infinite number of parts that are all equally important for the bigger picture.
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
The great virtue of the movie is its length: a fat-free seventy-six minutes.
The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.
While this appropriately brief film unravels its enigma at a tidy clip, it gathers neither enough heat, nor quite enough of a chill, to linger in the bones.
It’s a meticulous and tightly coiled cautionary tale, but it’s hard to imagine any of its characters having life outside the narrow confines of its stagy plot, or the edges of its carefully composed frames.
As you'd expect from an actor-director of Amalric's pedigree, the performances are brilliant throughout and Mathieu himself has a wonderful eye for the telling tick and/or the revealing gesture.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
While this may be the actor-director’s most polished feature yet, it’s far from a traditional suspense movie.
As it settles in, the thrilling chutzpah of The Blue Room’s opening salvo gets lost in the intricate curlicues of the plot, which take away much of its illicit rush.
Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.
Amalric's handling is cool, studied and perhaps a little self-conscious. But he does a good job of showing how adultery is a noose that tightens at the throat even before an actual crime is committed - at which point the film grows altogether less interesting.
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