“We are accustomed to see people driven to their limit,” said the writer George Simenon, responding to a question about violence in fiction in an interview with the Paris Review in 1955. Characters driven to their limit, especially men, is something that occurs again and again in Simenon’s large body of work, which encompasses somewhere around 400 novels (the numbers vary, depending on who you ask) that are usually divided between two categories — the Inspector Maigret detective novels and the romans durs (hard novels), which are considered more serious and less commercially appealing. He typically spent less than two weeks writing a novel, and legend has it that he wrote one in 24 hours while sitting in a glass cage in front of an audience, taking suggestions as he went along. Needless to say, the literary establishment has only recently begun to acknowledge his writing as something more than a factory of words.
Part of this newfound acceptance has to do with cinema. Filmmakers have been embracing Simenon’s work for a long time — Jean Renoir, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Bertrand Tavernier, and Bela Tarr are among hundreds who have translated the work for the screen, some better than others. Simenon’s stories were popular all over the world because they’re told so simply — he was known to chop away at his sentences until they were nakedly bare — which also makes it perfect material for filmmakers, who can expand on the books without taking too much away from the source.
“The Blue Room,” premiering at the New York Film Festival, is faithful to the novel of the same name, which makes it unusual among adaptations of Simenon’s work. Directed, co-written, and starring the actor Mathieu Amalric, the film focuses on a crime of passion between a married man and his mistress that slowly unravels via flashback as the authorities interview the main character. The audience is thrown into the story after it happened and is left to piece together answers through an unreliable main character. “Life is different when you live it and go back over it,” he tells the authorities, attempting to prove his innocence from the emotional fragments left behind.
In its broad strokes, the narrative resembles “Tropic Moon,” another Simenon romans durs (you don’t write that many novels without repeating yourself a few times), and one of my favorites, which features a similarly dispositioned man whose desire for a woman outside his class upends his fragile life. Amalric’s “Blue Room” treats these class conflicts much more subtly than Simenon does in his novels, and we only catch small instances of the difference between the main character and his mistress — she was the daughter of the town’s doctor, now the wife of the town pharmacist; he built a world of modern middle-class stability to distance himself from his past. As much as they try to escape their existence, they are trapped in the roles they’ve been assigned.
Amalric heightens this enclosure through the use of the traditional 1:33 aspect ratio, which gives the feeling that the characters are trapped in a box. Where the widescreen frame would have opened up the space, allowing the characters room to breathe, the square aspect ratio closes in on them. Within the frame, Amalric often gives his characters a lot of headroom, leaving the space at the top open and shrinking them in the process. Each composition is static, and the only major camera movement comes during the main character’s romanticized memory of his first meeting with his mistress. The hard-edged precision of the framings, which helps accelerate the intensity, is complicated by the use of natural light that bathes so much of the film and softens the image, ultimately resulting in more questions. Are we to believe what we’re seeing? Is this all just a dream?
Amalric is content to let these thoughts linger long after the story fades from the screen. We never know exactly what happened, and the questions seem beside the point. The answer may be that there are no answers, no right or wrong, no reality or fiction. There’s no escaping your position in life, no matter how hard you try. By the end of the film, our two main characters get what they want in the most tragic way possible.
