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A bedroom thriller in 'The Blue Room'

We enter actor-director Mathieu Amalric's startling, challenging, and spectacular postmodern murder mystery The Blue Room in the most intimate place imaginable: in a hotel room, in bed, in the space between two naked bodies.

Mathieu Amalric is Julien Gahyde (right) and Stéphanie Cléau is Esther Despierre (left) in "The Blue Room" from IFC Films.
Mathieu Amalric is Julien Gahyde (right) and Stéphanie Cléau is Esther Despierre (left) in "The Blue Room" from IFC Films.Read more

We enter actor-director Mathieu Amalric's startling, challenging, and spectacular postmodern murder mystery The Blue Room in the most intimate place imaginable: in a hotel room, in bed, in the space between two naked bodies.

A montage of extreme close-ups - her thighs, his hands, her belly, his shoulders - discloses, piecemeal, the couple whose names we learn much later are Esther Despierre (Stéphanie Cléau) and Julien Gahyde (Amalric).

Old friends from high school who haven't seen each other in 20 years, the lovers are married - she to a wealthy pharmacist, he to a pliant housewife eager to please him - when they reconnect for an explosive, passionate affair.

Their lovemaking is interrupted when Esther bites Julien's lip, drawing blood.

"Could you spend the rest of your life with me?" she asks as he checks out the wound at the wall mirror. Julien says yes without thinking.

And so begins the end for this doomed couple.

Suddenly, we hear the voice of an unseen man ask, "Did she bite you often?"

The man is an investigator in charge of a murder case. We realize the flashback is Julien's account of the affair now long over. And we notice Julien is in handcuffs.

Adapted from the devilishly clever 1955 novel by master crime author Georges Simenon, The Blue Room is a dazzling deconstruction of the mystery genre that turns its conventions on their heads.

Unlike most procedurals, it identifies the killer - Julien - within the first five minutes. But it withholds until its second half the nature of his crime or the identity of his victim (or victims).

We don't even know if the story we're getting is true, since the whole thing is presented from Julien's point of view. And he's a killer. Isn't he?

Amalric's brilliant conceit is to give us the story as recounted by Julien to a series of interrogators - the police, the examining magistrate, the prison psychiatrist, the judge, and so on. In turn, they size him up, judge him, determine if he is guilty or innocent, good or bad, man or beast.

In the process, The Blue Room stages a beautiful inquest into how the various bureaucracies that control our world define who we are and ought to be.

And it forces us not only to puzzle over the facts of the crime but also to rethink our assumptions about human identity. The question "Who am I?" isn't a settled affair, a matter of how I think about myself, but changes and morphs as I tell my life story to other people.

Amalric handles everything with such great control and economy, we're happy to let go of our gnawing questions and doubts and let him take us for a ride.

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