As the excellent TV Dekalog suggested, and the best film released here last year, the dense, questioning The Double Life Of Veronique, Poland's Krzysztof Kieslowski is one of Europe's premier filmmakers. His new film arrives garlanded from the Venice Film Festival (joint Best Film with Altman's Short Cuts) and as the opening salvo in a projected trilogy that takes as its themes liberty, equality and fraternity, and named for the colours in the French flag.

Blue takes as its focus the thirty-three year old Julie (Juliette Binoche), wife of a prominent European composer who dies with the couple's young daughter in a car crash which she survives. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, she slides in to mourning which takes the form of a complete denial of her life, attempting to move neither forward nor to confront the past, leaving her country home and setting up in a Paris apartment. But people and things cannot be so easily forgotten - despite Julie's attempts to destroy it, her husband's Concerto For Europe refuses to die, and she discovers that he had a mistress who is now pregnant with his child - forcing her to confront her new-found notion of freedom.

Although much less intangible than Veronique, Blue is still very much the product of the same film-maker. At its hub is a beautiful, contained woman somehow imbued with the ability to communicate far more than she ever says or simply does. In Kieslowski Binoche has finally found a director capable of drawing out the kind of performance she has so often threatened but somehow never delivered. Although she doesn't quite have the otherworldliness of Irene Jacob's twin role in the earlier picture, she still holds the centre of this piece together with remarkable power and stillness, particularly in the aftermath of despair when she realises her life has effectively been destroyed. For this she rightfully won Best Actress at Venice.

The third of Blue's Venice grab-bag went to Slawomir Idziak's luminous photography, shrouding proceedings in the same golden lustre as Veronique, distorting the familiar, and supremely detailed in its close-ups (witness the reflection of a doctor on Binoche's eyeball), but occasionally - especially in the omnipresent swimming pool - shot-through with an incandescent blue. Through that and a disjointed, coincidental narrative structure there is a distortion of time that makes it unsure if these events are days, weeks or even months in the unfolding.

Less sure is Zbigniew Preisner's score which is asked to suggest that Patrice was a musical genius and rises to the task, but is placed in an invidious position from which it cannot realistically succeed. The results while admirable and striking are unable to achieve the same extraordinary synthesis of image and music as Kieslowski managed with the same composer's not dissimilar score for Veronique.

Ultimately though, this is to treat the piece as referential only to Kieslowski's own oeuvre, and as such avoids admitting this to being a major film. The next - Red - will find him back on Polish home territory and on this evidence has to be one of the most keenly awaited films of future months.