Blue is the Warmest Colour

Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Actors: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Jérémie Laheurte

Synopsis: High school teenager, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), starts an affair with Fine Arts university student, Emma (Léa Seydoux), that lasts all the way into their professional lives as a teacher (Adèle) and artist (Emma) respectively…

Review: An elemental relationship unbridled by bourgeois parameters, and defined entirely by the interior ferocity of the participants’ pure attraction and empathy, gets exactly the same intense ethos of representation in its searing on-screen treatment from director, Abdellatif Kechiche.

It’s a masterfully realised film by Kechiche, and his success in creating such a sensual, timeless world is through the exclusion of any non-diegetic sound, and most cleverly the story doesn’t exist in a conventional dramatic timeline – consecutive scenes might be a matter of seconds apart in the narrative, or quite conceivably months or even years later. This lends the film its gravity but also its poignancy, not dissimilar from the way that time functions in that other epic portrayal of tragic love, Brokeback Mountain. Of course, Kechiche’s forensic, naturalist style – where his camera hugs the faces, the bodies and the breaths of its two main protagonists – positively screams for two excellent actresses, and Kechiche lucked out with performances of staggering force and grace from Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. It’s my favourite sort of film acting, where being actorly or “other than oneself” won’t do – the actor has to feel every emotion, they can’t act it.

A relatively late review of the film would clearly be remiss without passing comment on the controversy surrounding the one long, graphic sex scene involving Adèle and Emma midway through the film. I positively refute the kneejerk feminist critique that it appropriates the ‘male gaze’ or is a manifestation of a male fantasy of lesbian sexual experience. Rather, my problem with the scene is less its content than its unnecessary length, and if anything it betrays the slight clumsiness and demonstrativeness of some of Kechiche’s skills as dramaturgist. The scene is a rather drawn-out way of imprinting (as much through time as through imagery) how elemental and all-devouring the girls’ hungering for each other actually was. There are other examples, such as the soapy way that Kechiche induces conflict (Adèle sleeps with a male colleague, Emma catches her snogging him in a car) to bring about the epochal break-up. Of course, at some point you have to accept the dramatic world placed in front of you, but I feel – despite her obvious youthfulness – that Adèle’s love for Emma was so profound, that she wouldn’t have let any other party come between her and Emma.

That said, I saw this film more than 24 hours ago and it’s still buzzing around in my head (always the sign of a deep and affecting film). And I quite agree with Peter Bradshaw when he says that watching Blue is the Warmest Colour does make all the other current cinematic output really look rather tame. (December 2013)