Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide. Albert Camus

Returning from the fade the black, the film gives us a long shot of a feather, golden, undulating in the air current. We see a fuzzy image of a man approaching. He eventually puts his hand on top of the feather, resting on Julie’s arm.

This man is a doctor, played by Claude Duneton, Veronique’s kindly perfume-making father in “The Double Life of Veronique.” I missed the soft manner of that character, because this doctor has some of the worst bedside manner I’ve ever witnessed.

We see him only in the reflection off of Julie’s big brown left eye, a stunning cinematic technique I had never seen before. Perhaps the forced brevity of the style led to the brusque way the doctor reveals to Julie that her husband died in the car crash which injured her.

This leads Julie to look up at him — breaking the eye reflection vantage point — and ask him “Anna?” We notice Julie’s bruises and a cut above her left eye, her hair matted. This is not the glamorous Juliette Binoche we are used to seeing. When the doctor, coldly again, replies that yes, she died as well, Julie’s grief becomes too heavy to bear. She buries her head in the pillow.

During times of trauma, people often remember conversations as being much colder than they actually were, so there’s a psychological truth in this presentation. We can’t help but feel Julie’s deep loss.

This cuts to violence — a window smashing loudly. It is in a long, dramatically lit hospital corridor. We see immediately that Julie did this. She looks calm, determined, wearing a neck brace (another circle) and dressed all in white. She ducks into a medical office as a nurse scurries about and asks who is there.

Julie holds a set of keys and walks straight to the back of the office to a locked cabinet. She unlocks it and then looks at various pill bottles, finally settling on one. She accidentally knocks one over, but turns it back the right way. Julie’s conscientiousness is so deeply ingrained that even as she’s setting a chaos diversion and planning suicide, she puts pills back in their proper place.

She walks over to a desk and uses something to pry the lid off the bottle, then swallows all of the large disks inside it at once. She holds them in her mouth for a few seconds, then spits them out into her hand.

The nurse — who resembles a young Emmanuel Riva, the actress who plays Julie’s mother in this film — sees her do this, watching from outside a window to the office — reminiscent of the silent Watcher in the Dekalog. She then comes into the office. Julie tells her that she couldn’t do it and hands the pills to the nurse. She then apologizes for breaking the window. The nurse assures her that it is ok.

Julie’s words and gestures are like that of a small girl as she talks to the nurse, perhaps a reversion to childhood in this existential moment.

When faced with the greatest, most crushing loss imaginable, Julie confronted the philosophical imperative that Camus wrote about. And she chose to keep living. She now must decide what do to with that horrible freedom.