Taking Credit for someone else's work

I agree. Julie is not the composer.

I too believe that Julie atleast is the one of the composers with the greatest talent, perhaps even the only one there ever was. Olivier says something like:

I don't get to the partiture. It could be my music but heavy and awkward, or it could be your music; but then everyone would know...

I don't see why that was put in there unless to make it obvious that Julie indeed had a great part in patrice's composing.

The other composer that it was inspired by was Van den Budenmayer, remember that Valentine wants to buy a record with him in Rouge. [spoiler for Rogue] I also noted that Julie is presented as the widow of a dead composer when she is saved from the ferry in Rogue. So obviously she hadn't taken credit for the work, up until then.

I always think of Julie's blank encounters with music as her memories of her husband, the famous composer that she is trying to black out but the music is too strong. That is why she throws away the manuscript, to try and gain freedom from it to move on (liberty).

I am glad that there is a thread about the issue of taking credit for someone else's work. Incredibly, I find this to be at the heart of other issues that the movie addresses, yet I cannot find a review that deals with this.

That Julie doesn't care to go by name is suggested elsewhere in the film. She takes an apartment anonymously, as taking an apartment in her maiden name is also seen to be a way that nobody should be able to find her. And yet they do. Just as it is revealed that she is the composer of the music. She cannot hide in taking an apartment in anonymity any more than she can escape the music that she has created.

Similarly, her mother calls her by her mother's sister's name. Rather than repeatedly correcting her mother or feeling bad about this, Julie accepts that her mother does not recognize her. It does not add to the other losses that she has experienced. She takes it as a given that her own mother doesn't know her by name. Just as she will finally accept that nobody will know that she composed her husband's music.

This might, in fact, be the "liberty" that the film is really about. The generosity that we see born out of Julie's discoveries after the loss of her husband and her daughter include the freedom that she chooses: to go without that which finally rekindles her life--the music--so that she doesn't have to have the vain trappings that her husband evidently enjoyed during his life owing to his taking recognition for being a composer that he wasn't.

As for these trappings, I believe that one of the photo montages of Patrice even shows him as a recipient of the Legion of Honor. I could be wrong about that. Still, Julie never takes part in these trappings. All pictures of Patrice in his vainglory show him enjoying the spotlight without Julie. In fact, the photomontages seem obvious. I.e. it appears that they have been constructed, i.e. that the character, Patrice, has been obviously superimposed into as much as onto situations designed to honor him.

Is this deliberate or is it that today, 14 years after the film first appeared, the technology of photoshop et al are much better? I prefer to think that as Kieslowski was a master of montage, these clumsy montages were made that way on purpose, as if to suggest that this man, Patrice, really wasn't there.

The reviewer who touched on the chorus being from "Corinthians" here may be right on point. And, as well, the Greeks had several forms of love which the French, at least in social theory in the works of Luc Boltanski and others when the film was made, were even exploring for social theory.

Charity is seen as the highest form of love. Greater than eros and the third form of love that the Greeks recognized. Which I am forgetting as I write this...

Julie, I think when I see the film, must have let her husband take credit for her work out of her love for him as much as out of a recognition that he needed some form of credit more than he needed or was actually able to be a true creator.

She loved him and gave him this music because he loved her. Even when she finds out that he had another love, the lawyer who he knocked up and to whom he gave a necklace just like he gave Julie, Julie gives his other love their house in the country. Real charity.

Julie's love is put to the test when she has a chance to become known as the composer at the very end. Then she finds out that Olivier, Patrice's aid, is somewhat like Patrice.

Olivier seems to love Julie, as he has bought the mattress from the country house on which they had one night of love making. He tells Julie that he loves her when she asks him.

Yet Olivier, like Patrice, prefers the spotlight. He prefers that his awkward music be showcased than that the world have a true masterpiece, i.e. Julie's music. That is what I get from his last words to Julie. He uses what he takes to be her weakness, i.e. her generosity, to do exactly what her husband has done. He does not let it be known, in effect, that Julie is the artistic genius who has created masterpiece after masterpiece.

I guess that for me the issue of Patrice's (and Olivier's) vanity highlights how Julie achieves her liberty. Not through renunciation. Not in hiding. But in making choices. The choice to help the hooker keep her apartment. The choice to befriend the flautist outside the cafe where she goes in the afternoons. The choice to let Olivier, like Patrice, take credit because they are not true creators.

My impression was that she was the co-composer/editor of her husband's work. When they first show the score early in the work, I'm betting that the black notations are his and the blue are hers.

From Kieslowski on Kieslowski (p. 224):

For some people Julie is the author of the music we hear. At one stage the journalist asks Julie: 'Did you write your husband's music?' And Julie slams the door on her. So this possibility does exist. Then the copyist says: 'There are a lot of corrections.' There had always been a lot of corrections. Did Julie only do the corrections? Maybe she's one of those people who aren't able to write a single sheet of music but is wonderful in correcting a sheet which has already been written. She sees everything, has an excellent analytical mind and has a great talent for improving things. The written sheet of music isn't bad but when she's improved it it is excellent. But it's not all that important whether she's the author or co-author, whether she corrects or creates. Even if she only does do the corrections she's still the author or co-author because what has been corrected is better than it was before.