Slow moving (although only 76 minutes long), starting in the middle of confusion and sexual passion, and only very gradually revealing exactly what the central mystery being examined even is. All we know is that middle-class Julien (expertly played by director Amalric) and sexy, cold and intense Esther (the excellent Stephanie Cleau) have tremendous sexual chemistry, if not much real emotion between them. They are both married to other people, and we soon learn something awful has happened that has caused Julien to be under intense questioning by the police. All the other details are only revealed bit by bit as the story jumps around through a fractured time-scape.

Amalric uses the camera to underline and echo elements of the tricky construction, using odd, disquieting close ups that give us only a bit of the big picture, or pulling back to beautifully framed but distant feeling wider shots that give us the geography, but don't let us inside. The performances too – both by the leads and all the supporting characters – also serve the style. They're all dense and meticulously detailed, but it's up to us to figure out what those subtle details of behavior mean. Is that glance a look of love? Desire? Contempt? Does Julien's lawyer believe him? Does Julien's wife suspect or not?

If ultimately this adaptation of a Georges Simenon piece isn't quite as powerful as it's opening leads one to hope, it's still a smart, chilling and impressive directorial effort for Amalric.

Mathieu Amalric's talent is not an unknown quantity to American filmgoers. He won the César for his role as Jean-Dominique Bauby, who after a severe stroke, woke up speechless, and could only communicate with one eye, in Julien Schnabel's Le scaphandre et le papillon (Bell Jar and the Butterfly). For non-art-film buffs he may be better remembered as the villain Dominic Green in Marc Foster's James Bond Quantum of Solace.

Now, he is appearing in his and his life partner Stephanie Cléau's adaptation of Georges Simenon's La chamber blue (Blue Room), alas, playing unfortunately for a week in New York. Almaric also directed it, with a Spartan and sure hand of a seasoned director, although he's a novice in directing.

Simenon's is a crime story, but, for Almaric, in an interview with Metro US, sees it as a "fragmented memory piece." For him, "it's one of the rare novels, maybe the only one, where Simenon has no linear storytelling," thereby allowing him artistic license in writing the script.

Running 75 minutes, La chamber blue is a fast paced narrative, shot in 20 days, with Almaric's effective use of flashbacks, as an tempt to retrieve involuntary memory.

La chamber blue's a hotel room in which Julien (Almaric) and his mistress Esther (Cléau) meet every Thursday, to make love.

It is a steamy affair sustained by Esther's strong sexual desire for Julien and Julien's ambivalent powerful drive for her.

We are not in a romance as is the wont of the standard, ordinary, and, at times, dreadful Hollywood romances. La chamber blue is a film about passion, a passion so overwhelming that Esther black widow like is willing to go to any length to snare her lover in a trap that has no escape.

Almaric and Cléau have captured Simenon's all-encompassing liking for sex. The opening scene staggers our eyes for it a shot of Esther's opening and closing of her legs, fully exposing her vagina. Shocking but brilliant, the shot brings to mind Corbet's famous painting Origin of the world, the image of which Almaric uses as source of obsession and lure that Esther has for Julien,. Love in Thursday afternoon captures the claustrophobic, solipsistic hothouse adventure that can only end in tragedy, but, to Esther's mind a satisfying conclusion for her compulsive desire and designs to have Julien for herself.

Christophe Beaucarne's skillfully cuts in and out of the film's narrative with incomplete portions of what is happening on the screen until the outcome of the story line in The Blue Room, as the dialog skips from the bed to questioning by le juge d'instruction—the magistrate in France responsible for conducting the investigative hearing that precedes a criminal trial.

As the clues are collected, we see the effect of Esther's obsession has on Julien, his marriage to Delphine (Léa Drucker), as well as the workings of the French judicial system. Not only that, but in spite of the disjointedness of the story, the narrative, in substance, is a good example of Gallic classicism. Julien is caught in the weave of Esther's passion that results in the murder of her husband and of Delphine. Like a rat in a maze, naïve victim that he is, under the questioning of the examining magistrate Diem (Laurent Poitrenaux), he is at sixes and sevens on how to respond as his dossier grows thicker and thicker with "proof of his guilt." As the Sieur des Grieux in Abbé Prévot's Manon Lescaut explains "my evil star already in the ascendant drawing me to my ruin—did not allow me to hesitate one moment," neither could Julien escape no matter how he tried from Esther's fatal attraction for him, and from the enticement of the blue room's bed. In the end, he is a beaten man, albeit it innocent of murder, but in the eyes of the court and evidence forever guilty. He and Esther are tried together. Each is found guilty as charged, and each is sentenced to life imprisonment. And in that finality of the rest of her life in perpetual seclusion, Esther triumphant, her eyes brighten as she smugly smiles, saying to her hapless lover that although separated by prison walls, he forever will be hers to share with no one. In the closing shots, as the spectators leave the courtroom, as the camera lens widens we see, irony or ironies, that what in the beginning was a blue room of lust and passion, in the end, it with its blue walls has turned into a blue room of justice. The acting is top of the form. The script compelling and intelligent in the way it adapted Simenon's sparse prose to the big screen, as well in the way it conveys his malaise and the atmosphere he created suggesting excessive emotions. For any student with at least two years of French, Simenon's prose is straightforward and standard enough for you to understand without looking at subtitles. It is a pity that a first-rate film like Le chamber bleue will play only in art houses, so, alas, is the statement on American public's taste for, and interest in, well-made foreign language films.

The Blue Room" (2014 release from France; 76 min.) brings the story of a man and a woman. As the movie opens, we hear the moans and whispers of a couple making love. Turns out to be Julie and Delphine. Pretty soon we come to understand that they are married, but not to each other. Delphine whispers to Julien: "Imagine what our days could be like, if we ran away". Little does she know what is to come... Just a few minutes into the movie, we then jump to the present day, where Julien is being interrogated at the police station, but we don't know why. To tell you more of the movie's plot would surely spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: first, this movie is based on the book of the same name by famed Belgian crime writer Georges Simeon (he died some 25 years ago). This prolific author has written dozens and dozens of crime novels, and many have been made into a movie. (I grew up in Belgium in the 70s, and he had the reputation of a giant.) Second, this movie is very much a labor of love for French actor Mathieu Amalric, who not only plays the lead role of Julien, but also directed the movie. Third, as the movie started out, I thought that this might be a "Fatal Attraction"-type movie, but as it turns out this is very much a police and court drama. A huge chunk of the movie plays out in the interrogations at the police station, even though it is interwoven with plenty of flashbacks as to what exactly happened. For those of you not familiar with the continental European criminal justice system, you will be in for a few extra surprises, as the differences with the American criminal justice system are profound. Also noteworthy is the very unusual screen ratio (almost but not quite 1:1). Last but not least, there is an outstanding orchestral score to the movie, composed by Gregoire Hetzel, and I only wish it was used more extensively in the movie (there are long sections where no score is used).

"The Blue Room" opened without any pre-release hype or fanfare at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati in late October/early November (it only played a week). The early evening screening where I saw this at was not well attended (less than 10 people) but frankly I was surprised there were even that many people for this. Bottom line: I thought that "The Blue Room" was a nice change of pace from the crime dramas that we are used to in the US. If you like French movies with lots of talking and not much 'action' per se, I'd readily recommend you check this out.

"Life is different from when you live it to when you look back at it"

-Julien

I first heard of this picture when it was selected to be a part of the Cannes Film Festival. I was curious to see what the buzz would be since the film was directed by Mathieu Amalric, a French actor I very much admire and I found to be very underrated. This was not his first shot at directing since I believe this is actually his fourth or third picture. The buzz that eventually came was good and I was interested to see it since it had been recently released in theaters near me.

The Blue Room is Directed by Mathieu Amalric and it stars Mathieu Amalric, Léa Drucker and Stéphanie Cléau. "A man and a woman, secretly in love, alone in a room. They desire each other, want each other, and even bite each other. In the afterglow, they share a few sweet nothings. At least the man seemed to believe they were nothing. Now under investigation by the police and the courts, what is he accused of?"

I was interested, curious to see what this film was all about, still I had my expectations low, which opened room for surprise. I got to say that the film was indeed a little surprise, it didn't at all disappoint. It's a modest, even if tidy little picture that's unexpectedly inventive in its film-making and narrative/storytelling choices.

This is one of those films that the grand majority wont see, even major film buffs, and I do think that that is a shame, because although far from being a knockout, it is still worth your watch. This small, tight tiny 75 minute picture is an adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, a novel of the same name. Simenon would probably be impressed with the run-time since the man could write novels in only a few weeks.

It's small film, that never really aspires to be anything bigger, I did think that I lacked a little bit of ambition and when the film ends we don't feel totally fulfilled mainly also because we don't see much of the point in this story. "So what" is probably going to be the reaction of many going out of the theater, and others will undeniably be thrown out by an unconventional way of storytelling, which made things a bit confusing at times but all the more engaging, fresh and exciting as an whole. It's a film that will probably disappoint bigger audiences (those who even get to see it), since it's a film with a high level of ambiguity and it has disorienting story-telling, you will leave with little answers, or no answers at all. The film focuses on the ambiguity and interpretation of memory, actions and intentions.

I left with the theater with little answers and I did get the feeling of "So What" when the credits start to roll but still I got to say that I did enjoy myself. Amalric beautifully constructs and puts together this film, honoring its source material. We are kept in two different times and spaces during the film, first inside Julien's head and his memories, or at least his perception and we also get to see things from the future, where he is in jail and being questioned about his love affair with an old friend from high- school who is now his lover. What did the man do? Are we seeing the memories of a murder? Is he guilty of whatever he is being charged with? Those questions keep going through our heads as we soon start to find more and more meandering pieces of this jigsaw who's eventually left undone.

The acting is also excellent. Mathieu Amalric leads his own cast and he's as always fantastic. Is this the face of a killer? Is he innocent? Great display of talent once again, he doesn't either give easy answers in the directing or in the acting, effective and powerful though. We believe for every second his on screen, that that guy is really there and we believe in his existence. The supporting cast is also very good, nothing too showy but they do their jobs. Amalric is really the man to be applauded, he directs, acts and adapts the source material, all with little or no flaws at all. I applaud is boldness and creativity when it came to storytelling and putting the film together in the editing room. It is successful as a modest suspense picture and as a drama, it fails a bit because it feels a bit too tame, small and it ultimately doesn't leave a big mark on you, even though I wont forget it soon.

Rating:B-

The Blue Room is a French crime drama based on a novel of the same name by Georges Simenon and is directed by the lead actor, Mathieu Amalric. The film opens up in what is later revealed to be a flashback where the main character, Julien (played by Amalric), a married man, recalls his sexual experience with a woman (played by Stephanie Cleau) in a hotel room to the police. Julien is being accused of a crime that he doesn't apparently know anything about. As the film continues, and we go further and further into the story, we find out what actually did happen between this man and woman, as well as, the relationship between this man and his wife, eventually leading to a court case.

The movie's most interesting elements are its story structure, told in flashback, and its use of its musical score. One of my favorite scenes concerns Julien trying to burn some papers and they slowly vanish into the darkness of the ocean. The way this scene is filmed and framed, being intentionally slow, made it very interesting from a filmmaking standpoint.

The musical score is often bombastic, and scenes that aren't really meant to be dramatic carried a melodramatic theme. The score itself goes through different phases, from the very dramatic, to the mysterious, scary and even intimidating. The best use of the score in the film is during a court scene where we see people doing various things all at once. The background piano music fits the theme of this scene particularly well.

This film has good acting from its lead actors and lovely cinematography. If you like stories of adultery and crime, you will not be disappointed, however I found that the film wasn't particularly memorable or anything special overall.

The Blue Room is beautifully acted and Mathieu Amalric delivers another of his cinematographic jewels. First off, I totally disagree with other reviewers claiming this movie to be an offshoot of Fatal Attraction. Second, you'll be watching the wrong movie if your intend is gazing over explicit sex scenes. This is not an erotic movie.

This being said - SPOILERS ALERT - Watch the movie first before you continue reading this review.

It's the story of two lovers falling into a diabolic trap. We come to know that Julien and Delphine grew up in the same town where they also attended the same school. Delphine was in love with Julien but he never noticed her other that she was taller than him. Eventually, after school, they both went their own ways. Delphine married a doctor but his mother always disapproved the marriage claiming Delphine to be after her sons' money. The mother lives in the same house of her son and Delphine. Delphine runs a pharmacy from that house as well. Julien is married has a daughter and a successful career. Years later....Julien is driving and sees Delphine on the side of the road struggling to replace the flat tire of her car with the spare. They instantly fall for each other.

Fast forward.

Many in town were aware of the affair and are now convinced that, for obvious reasons, the lovers eliminated their partners. The pretrial proceedings and tabloid lynching results in lawyers, courts and judges to be biased resulting in the two lovers being doomed by the time the trial starts. They clearly are resigned to the outcome of their ordeal but for different reasons. At this point Delphine is totally blinded by her romanticized love for Julien. As for Julien, he's aware that there's no way out and, therefore, indifferent to the trial. At this point, he's also convinced Delphine to be the perpetrator of the killings until, at the very end of the trial, he realizes who the real murderer is. Remember the testimony of the flamboyant red head ?

The film is disturbing, but is brilliantly and meticulously constructed, with flashbacks and snippets of action, arranged so that bit-by-bit the viewer comes to grasp what has taken place. One theme is the potential for tragic consequences of succumbing to sexual temptation (think "Fatal Attraction").

But above all, this is a story of a criminal justice system going horribly wrong. A weak individual, already reeling from a terrible tragedy, is further victimized by the machinations of the prosecution. With no allies and powerless to defend himself from what is happening to him, in the end his life is totally destroyed.

This is really quite a simple story. Man has affair with other man's wife. Has wife and family but re-unites with woman he met before his marriage. They have a series of trysts. She has a husband who has a serious medical condition and one day he dies. Unfortunately, the woman is a pharmacist and it appears that they have done a "Postman Always Rings Twice" murder. The whole thing focuses on a bewildered man who realizes that his actions have a consequence. He's not even sure what has happened as he sits in a courtroom. Sometimes justice is less about criminal justice and more about moral justice. A slow moving psychological drama based on a George Simenon novel.

I loved this picture. Everything about it is beautifully done. Acting, editing, screen play, direction, music, all contribute to what is one of the best mysteries on screen that I've seen. But the picture defies classification as a mystery. It plows through the ambiguous details of a passionate affair, unfulfilled marriages, and police investigation that results in convictions of murder and life sentences. The details of the script have been well reported in the other user reviews, so i won't get into them here. My only comment is in the meaning of the film to me. What I came away with is a conclusion that the lovers were found guilty not for what they did, but for what they willed. Their guilt was in their desire, guilt enough for a moral conviction punished by the state with a life sentenced to live with their guilt.

I started to watch the film after midnight and it was slow. I was sure I'd be asleep soon but the slow pace was matched with constant small pieces of the puzzle being put into place. The acting is good but also fairly monotone but since half the film deals with incidents in police custody and after some terrible deaths - you can see why the people would not be especially expressive.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

I like that I could not be sure who the murderer was. Some have said they are sure it is one person or the other but I would argue that you can't tell from the film.

Julien is often seen as the patsy in the film and I suspect he is. But I also would not put it past him to be the murderer esp seeing his anger when his wife was on the latter. But I think he loved his daughter too much to murder her mother.

Delphine, Julien's wife, is a victim but there is something else going on. Much of her behaviour seems typical distant couple but we wonder if she knows of the affair, she seems esp distant in some scenes esp her reasons for not smiling while on the ladder and esp when she reacts so strongly hearing of the death. Makes you wonder if there was not another affair going on.

Ester appears to be the person behind the murders as she clearly infatuated with Julien (although the dynamics are not there to explain why). Yet her correspondence with Julien is very casual. Four letters in five months? Cool to him in the drugstore. If nothing else when Julien bangs her head in the magistrate's office - you think that would stop any casual sense of love.

Nicholas' mother at one point could easily be the murderer. She had motive and opportunity. We see that at the end of the story very well. Some are sure she is.

It wouldn't explain Delphine but Nicholas could have known of the affair, and knowing he didn't have long to live, took his own life so that his wife and her lover would be blamed.

Not understanding the French legal system then it is difficult to understand how they were convicted.

There was mixed testimony on if Nicholas was even poisoned or not. So if you can't say for sure he was poisoned then was it murder?

The discussion of the letters was common yet they didn't exist. At one point his lawyer says "letters that she shays she wrote". There seemed to be much discussion on the interpretation of those yet they didn't exist anymore.

After the husband's death and it might or might not be murder then the murder of Delphine is just so obvious. It's clearly murder. It's going to be investigated. Since both of them seemed to feel that others knew of the affair esp the chamber maid then there was no way it wouldn't lead to an re-examination of the husband's death.

For Julien the only evidence was that he picked up some homemade jam for his wife, that she normally orders, and dropped it off at the house and returned to work.

The fact he was behind the building and was there for "minutes" is silly. We all sometimes get into our car and don't leave. We daydream, listen to a song on the radio, plan our next steps in the day. And if I were going to open and poison a bottle of jam then why would I do that anywhere near people. Also if it was a conspiracy then it is more likely Ester would have poisoned it at work at the drugstore.

We often say who has the most motive with any death. In this case the death of the husband and the wife link to a couple having an affair. An affair that seems to be over for months and could be easily proved with testimony of the hotel clerk etc. Yet it seems clear that two people benefited from the death of Nicolas - his wife and his sister. His sister who said in court that she thought her sister-in-law married only for the money. If "everyone" knew of the affair then so did the sister. In fact she would likely be the person told first. So her brother is dying and she will have to share the business with her sister-in-law who was cheating on her brother. So what better way to get back, and working in a drugstore would have the means, then to poison the brother (maybe with his agreement) and then since the jam was with her at the drugstore - the jam. It would be easy to know that only the wife ate that jam so you don't risk poisoning the husband or daughter.

In the end it is the sister who benefits all around.

about desire. about the role of the other. about flesh and love and hidden by yourself sins, about the search of yourself and about the fall of a night.about justice. a film who mix, in wise manner, the seduction with fascination. a work of beauty and dark secrets and images of victims and fragile intentions. it could be the film of Mathieu Amalric. like many of his films because he has the science and the gift to propose the right solution for the tone of story. because it is a film of details, about a not special event, in which the states of characters remains the only significant thing. so, a film who must see. for the acting first. then, for atmosphere.

Julien Gahyde (Mathieu Amalric) and Esther Despierre are former classmates and having an affair. Julien is married to Delphine with a daughter Suzanne. When Esther's pharmacist husband is found dead, Julien is brought in by the police for an interview. Then Delphine is found dead and the police suspects poisoning.

I find this a muddled, confused, and flat telling of a possible murder mystery. The odd thing is that it's deliberately muddled, confused and flat. It's reworking the traditional crime drama. It's admirable but I don't think it works. The tension is all gone. There are no thrills. I don't think we even see the dead bodies. Mathieu Amalric is a great actor but the flat telling keeps the audience at a distance from the characters. There are moments where one gets glimpses something deeper in his character but he keeps the mask on for most of the movie. It's hard to say if the truth is revealed and that's kind of the point of the movie.

What if there was a crime drama and no one cared who did it? You'd have The Blue Room. I went to see this film because I'm a fan of foreign films. They generally paint very different pictures of people, places and daily life than we get from Hollywood. Even poor foreign films give me glimpses of interesting people and places or a story that makes me think. This film had absolutely none of those qualities. The characters are depressed, bleak and boring. The nudity wasn't the least bit erotic. There is no sense that anyone cares for each other in any meaningful way, not even a father for his daughter or vice versa. The two main characters are having an affair but their spouses don't seem to notice or care who does what all day. I was hoping I'd feel sorry for his wife, but I didn't because she was nearly as boring and lifeless as he was. Even the police detectives seem to be bored with the whole affair. There is one good thing about this movie however: it's short... only about one and a half hours until it is mercifully over.

Laden with awards and nominations (well deserved) Mathieu Amlaric is always a good bet, whether acting, directing, writing, or, as here, all three, he seldom lets you down and on the whole opts for interesting and/or unusual projects. Writing and acting with his real life partner (he was, at one time, married to another fine if somewhat neglected actress Jeanne Balibar) Stephanie Cleau, not exactly chopped liver if anyone asks you, he has elected as source material a non-linear novel by Georges Simenon, arguably the most adapted novelist of all time, and the partners have done an excellent job in both departments. The film's strength is in keeping you guessing whether you are watching an account of an intense affair - a la liaison pornographique with Nathalie Baye - a crime passionel, a courtroom drama or, as it turns out, all three. This is top of the line whichever way you look at it and the DVD is already on my list.

Reading that the movie is a thriller based on Georges Simenon's novel, I expected to see a good French adaption of the book. However, there was no suspension and no thrills in what Mathieu Amalric did with a good story. Even the episodes shown on TV channel ID are more intriguing and more entertaining. I am always wondering why the French movie makers tend to mess up their stories. Somebody can call it an intelligent movie, but it looks more like a pretentious and muddled change of scenes. Simenon's story had a great potential, but Mathieu Amalric succeeded to kill it on the screen with both his script and his direction.

Mathieu Amalric isn't one to shy away from a risky project—has anybody seen the film where he plays a shrink and Benicio Del Toro's a Blackfoot WWII vet with PTSD? Here he and his real-life partner, Stéphanie Cléau, co-star in a stripped-down 75' adaptation of a Simenon story of erotic obsession and justice gone awry. The fine performances and the film's time-shuffling structure help maintain a high level of suspense at least past the halfway mark, though it seems to me that Amalric and Cléau, who also wrote the script, might have thrown a little too much of Simenon's backstory out with the bathwater.

The plodding inquiry that begins even before we know a crime has been committed certainly explains Julien's (MA's character's) air of glum fatalism through the second half of the film, but the script's intense focus on the two lovers doesn't prepare us for the final courtroom scene, in which a character we've barely seen before steps into the spotlight. (I'm planning to watch again to test the hypothesis, suggested by some online reviewers, that the crime the protags are charged with was committed by someone else…)

The courtroom scene has a nightmarish quality, like one of Hitchcock's "wrong man" films; the trial itself seems like an open-mic session where gossipy townsfolk step up to air their gripes about the defendants—one witness dismisses Julien's stylish modernist house as a "crappy little shack." There's certainly a disconnect between Simenon's view of blind, blundering justice and our own no doubt idealized police procedurals and courtroom dramas; I agree with other reviewers that Julien would have excellent grounds for appeal on the basis of blatant judicial bias and ineffective counsel.

not an ordinary adaptation. the spirit of many contemporary French films. Mathieu Amalric using same tools to build his character. a Simenon in different manner. a cold film about relationship and decisions, about guilty and events who has a strange touching manner to surprise the viewer not for evolution of events but for the attitudes of characters. a film of silence and guilty out of facts. because it preserves the Greek mark of destiny, the poetry of things, the emotions as a kind of fog. nothing clear, each detail as part of a sort of ambiguity and slow rhythm of events. a film with a specific target who could seems be boring for many. but useful with few drops of patience. and with a crumb of interest for Simenon universe.

Just watched this movie & thought it interesting enough to read the original novel from whence it came when it's published in English in early 2016. What cracks me up in all these French Flicks is the Male Stars are always these little sleazy, wimpy, unclean looking weird guys and the Female Stars are always attractive, younger (and taller) women. For instance in this Flick this is exactly the case. The Mistress is attractive, probably a foot taller and 10 years younger than the Male Star. Why she repeatedly jumps in bed with this guy is a wonder to me. Maybe I'm just envious, but really? It must just be annoying for French Actresses to always have to play lovers, wife's, mistresses to these Frogs. On the other hand it must be great to be a French Man! I'd be really curious if any female reviewers really find the Male Star of this movie attractive or worthy of their attentions.