Vibrant in moments yet pale overall, Bluish blossoms with its exploration of two young women finding their way in Vienna. Directors Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky follow Sasha and Errol through quiet scenes of their daily lives, revealing thoughtful insights beneath routine realities.
Kraxner and Czernovsky established their interest in stripped-down storytelling with Beatrix in 2021. Like its predecessor, Bluish prioritizes visuals, gestures, and glances over dialogue to convey mood. Sasha speaks mostly English in Russia-born Errol’s native German setting, yet another layer of distance between self and surroundings.
The film centers in liminal space between ages, a time of searching without clear answers. Technology connects yet distances today’s youth, and COVID restricts gatherings, redefining intimacy. While introvert Errol observes shyly, extrovert Sasha engages through dance and art, exploring identity despite language barriers.
Kraxner and Czernovsky cultivate stillness for lingering looks. Constantly in motion yet bound to static frames, the women inhabit a grayscale blue world, longing and occasionally linking through play. Subtle character details emerge through subtle social cues rather than dramatic plots.
With Bluish, these emerging filmmakers blossom further in crafting resonant portraits of quiet questions within quiet lives. Though understated, the film offers immersive glimpses into unfolding alongside Vienna’s youth, granting empathy to their experiences of bloom.
Bluish Hues
Color plays a crucial role in Bluish, draping every scene in varying shades of blue. From pale azure to deep navy, the nuanced palette matches the film’s contemplative mood. Sasha’s blue nail polish, the pool’s cerulean waters—even phone screens cast faces in periwinkle glow.
Cinematographer Antonia de la Luz Kašik brings these hues to life with a lush, luminous grain. Scenes whisper softly through a blurred lens, drawing eyes toward fleeting details. Kašik’s 1.33 aspect ratio contributes too, intensifying focal points within static frames.
Far from confining, the square format allows Errol and Sasha freedom to emerge, linger, or depart on a whim. They float in and out like thoughts, connected yet removed from reality. Watching feels voyeuristic yet hopeful—perhaps they’ll find solace in places deemed constricting.
Kraxner and Czernovsky harness still frames through subtle movements, glimpsing inner lives beyond dialogue. Lyrical shots prize contemplation over action. Viewers drift with the flow, immersed yet distanced like the women themselves, observing exploration of self and others from a spectral edge.
Bluish succeeds in its goal of conveying emotional states through aesthetic alone. Admiring its masterful use of color and composition reveals layers beyond surface simplicity. Visuals speak where words fail, conveying the beauty of being between and belonging to nothing completely.
Quiet Portraits
Kraxner and Czernovsky craft Bluish with a stripped style highlighting subtle expressions. Just as in Beatrix, conversations take backseat to fleeting looks and introspective moments.
Scenes unfold like daily snapshots rather than climactic story beats. We linger in equal parts on painting supplies runs or coffee dates, absorbing routine snapshots that reveal inner lives. It echoes films like Audrey embracing the mundane.
Two distinct young women emerge through spare portraits. Shy Errol observes with care yet withdraws within. Dance lets extrovert Sasha connect physically where words fail. Leonie Bramberger immerses fully as Errol, betraying a soul reluctant yet longing to bloom.
Direction retains stillness while portraying movement. Frames remain static yet compose living paintings, capturing flow within constraint like youth itself. Dialogue fades, but eyes and gestures resonate, conveying emotional truths that transcend surface simplicity.
Understated style suits understated tales, prioritizing intimacy over drama. Kraxner and Czernovsky see profoundly within minimalism, gently unveiling resonant reflection on finding place and purpose in a world of transitions. Fans of character studies will find thoughtful nuance in Bluish’s quiet portraits.
Transitions and Connections
Kraxner and Czernovsky place us firmly within Errol and Sasha’s period of transition. Late teens to early twenties see one straddling independence and dependence, knowing oneself yet continuing discovery.
The film ponders searching for identity in that gap. Who are these women becoming? What shapes fill their lives’ frames? Zoom classes, furniture shopping, art—routines emerge yet nothing feels permanent.
Technology intertwines with experience today in ways past youth avoided. Video calls connect to education but distance from peers. Dating apps foster intimacy yet filter reality. Screens bond and divide, reflecting faces within but screens between.
Pandemic altered how the young explore intimacy too. Gatherings moved inside, yet connection felt farther out of reach there. COVID may influence a generation’s relationships to public and private people and space for years to come.
Though specifics remain vague, Bluish intimately captures questioning and discovery within change. Kraxner and Czernovsky gift consideration for lives in transition through these women stepping within and out of roles, grasping moments while suspended between what was and what will be. The film offers poignant insight into navigating today as yesterday fades and tomorrow remains unseen.
Questions of the Screen
Kraxner and Czernovsky invite examination of artificiality and the constructions that compose “reality.” Scenes toy with walls as frames and their transition from mere surfaces to vessels of meaning.
In a striking moment, Errol methodically frames emptiness, her rectangle of tape a self-reflexive comment on cinema’s power to imbue blank spaces with significance. It prompts questioning when reality transforms under the lens—and whether such transformations were always latent edges awaiting illumination.
VR clips and singing introductions further unravel separations of fabrication and authenticity. Audiences peer through screens within the screen, voyeurs to performances that entertain while imparting existential ponders. When does the observed cease being objective and instead compose the observed self?
The climactic meditation mystifies such queries in a pitch-black plunge, leaving presence uncertain. Dissolving distinctions between viewer and viewed, inner and outer, it encapsulates Kraxner and Czernovsky’s exploration of identities as performances for audiences of one.
Ultimately, Bluish presents no clear answers but thoughtful meditation on the constructed nature of truths and how existence interacts with its own renditions. It reignites timeless questions of the screen and life observed through its illuminated rectangles.
Parallels and Pandemic Portraits
Bluish invites consideration alongside films exploring quietude. The mute communion between frame and drifting subjects brings to mind Kieslowski’s melancholic Three Colors Blue.
Like Rohmer’s works, stillness holds significance here rather than mere transition. Moments resonate over incident through astute attention to fleeting cues. Akerman too housed stories within routines and functions.
Structurally, Bluish echoes Audrey—spare vignettes granting everyday reflexivity mythical weight. Bohdanowicz appreciated how small gestures impart existential imprints.
A shift towards introspection seems pandemic-prompted, as Kraxner and Czernovsky are not alone in bearing witness to youth navigating intimacy within distance. Their aptly timed works capture alienation within hyperconnectivity, physical removal amid digital immersion.
Drawn in by beats of blue and women suspended in transitions, viewers float along frame by frame, immersed yet separate—finding parallels in parallel portraits. Subtle art depicting interiority through exteriors invites thoughtful company through isolation.
Resonating Visions of Transition
Kraxner and Czernovsky demonstrate a wise, beguiling vision with Bluish. Their quiet, contemplative tales gift space for lingering within lives in metamorphosis.
Through sparse beauty, the film probes delicate questions of identity and reality, perception and performance. Scenes and souls float, never belonging entirely to a frame or moment. In stillness lays mystery; in stillness emerges empathy.
Bluish invites insightful reflection on youth negotiating independence alongside constriction. Digital connection compounds physical distance; intimacy evolves. Generation Z navigates new terrain, buoyed by resilience yet scarred by rapid change.
This window into transition through two Vienna women resonates deeply. Kraxner and Czernovsky’s nuanced portrayals illuminate shared humanity beneath superficial divides. Their emerging talents promise ever-thoughtful, empathic visions to come.
Prescient in subject and style, Bluish deserves acclaim and discussion. Its pathways may wander, but destinations prove less vital than dignifying each step within life’s fluid odyssey. For illuminating transition’s beauty, the film earns praise and fascinated attention from festive audiences.
The Review
Bluish
In delicate, perceptive strokes, Bluish paints a moving portrait of lives in quiet passage. Directors Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky craft a deeply empathetic window into the mutable moments of young Vienna lives, granting empathy and insight to their explorations of self and others. Though understated, this earnest and masterfully aesthetic film resonates profoundly, proving that intimate acts of observation can impart universal understanding.
PROS
- Sensitive direction and performances that feel authentic
- Evocative visual palette and compositions that enhance themes
- Thoughtful exploration of generational questions around identity and connection
- Subtle character studies that reveal depths beneath surfaces
- Achieves meaningful resonance through understatement
CONS
- May feel too slow or minimalist for some viewers.
- Open to interpretation without definitive conclusions
- It requires patience and active viewing to fully appreciate layered meanings.
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