Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) directs and stars in this brilliantly performed adaptation of George Simenon’s taut 1964 novel of the same name. Amalric plays Julien, a modestly successful man in provincial France running his own agricultural business, living in a designer house with a young family, who finds himself in the depths of an affair. The film is tantalisingly sliced and pieced together through flashbacks, so you catch glimpses of his life unravelling and spiralling out of control.
Amalric’s Julien is irredeemably flawed, his humanity scored by violence, moral weakness and, ultimately, torn asunder by lust. Behind the camera, he exhibits a gift for capturing the most revealing nuances, The Blue Room marking Amalric’s growing mastery of his art.
In his second feature as a director, Amalric has crafted a mystery of savage tautness, cutting away all extraneous elements to leave the heart of a story that compellingly teases at the truth.
