Movies that helped shaping my thought process 2 The Three Colors Blue

After ‘Gandhi’, I have to mention the film named  Blue from the famous The Three Colors series. or its creator Krzysztof Kieślowski. His art of storytelling has influenced my thought process to a great extent.

I had been writing a series of parallel stories since the year 2000; I had no idea at the time that these are called parallel stories.  Most of the stories dealt with the dark aspect of the human mind and had an undiluted structure. I didn’t compromise by altering even a single sentence of this chronicle just for the sake of so-called linearity of structure. The result was that for those who couldn’t devote enough time to a paragraph and reflect on the human feelings behind those words, this series remained indecipherable or worse, an exercise in futility. I experienced great creative satisfaction while writing them and was eager to see the reaction of my readers. This was where I faced a problem; you see, most of my friends are not into literature and hence, I couldn’t depend on them to give me a proper feedback. Moreover, I was residing away from my home state, Assam, so I could not understand first-hand how the readers were responding to my creative effort by any sort of interaction with them.

I concluded that the stories into which I had put so much time and effort, turned out to be some incoherent gibberish. I went into a kind of depression, repeatedly asking myself whether I should compromise on my writing style. Should I start writing in a simple linear style (which is not my way of storytelling)? Should I write about populist clichés that do not excite my creativity at all? (Assam has its own trends of bestselling plots). On a more megalomaniac note, I was beginning to think that there was no one in this world, who thinks like me, that there were no takers for original thinking, that I was a lone man amongst an indifferent swarm of people.

Then I happened to come across this much heard series – directed by Kieślowski . Three colours Blue was my first Kieslowski movie, which I watched in 2007. As the film progressed, I realised that the thought process of the protagonist or the scriptwriter behind the scenes reverberated with mine.  Many of the frames of ‘Blue’ inspired me. What I found most inspiring about this series is that the auteur didn’t compromise on anything while presenting his creative vision, yet he was able to connect with his audience, to convey his version to the world. This fact encouraged me and eventually I decided NOT TO CHANGE MY STYLE.

In this movie, there is a scene in which the female protagonist was having coffee in a restaurant and a street musician was playing some music. The tune was the same as the one her husband was composing, but he died before being able to complete it. How could an unfinished musical score have reached the street musician? Later, during an interview, Kieślowski had this to say about it, “Music never dies, it vibrates, swirls in the atmosphere, you just have to pick it up from nature.”

I watched Three colors Blue in 2007, but this message from the scene was the seed of a Play –ঐক্যতান Akoikyatan (The Beethoven of someone’s love), I had written, directed and staged in 1997.

At that time, the whole unit of the play had the same doubt that I had been having – “Does anyone think like us?” The discovery of Kieślowski through Blue was a positive propelling force for me, it reinforced my intention to continue writing in my own unadulterated style by being true to myself.