Blue is the Warmest Colour

Year: 2013

Running time: 180 minutes

Certificate: 18

Language: French

Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche

Starring: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Salim Kechiouche, Aurélien Recoing, Catherine Salée, Alma Jodorowsky, Benjamin Siksou, Jérémie Laheurte, Anne Loiret, Benoît Pilot

The joyous flush of new love.

It's hard to find the right words to talk about this film, because it caused me to have a very strong emotional reaction - I was wrung out by the end of it, for reasons I'll go into later. Then there was the interviews the two lead actresses started giving on the promotional tour, where they would talk about their discomfort filming some of the scenes, which appeared to surprise director Abdellatif Kechiche, who then proceeded to rant to all and sundry. Having had such a powerful, profound and personal reaction to it, to find there was some bad blood now between the actresses and their director has inevitably soured the experience a little for me, which is a real shame, because it is such an incredible piece of work.

To sum up, it's a about loving and losing for the first time, but to condense 3 hours of exquisite cinema to such a short line is to do the film a grave injustice. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a teenage high-school student, with a fairly average home life. Like most people her age, she is trying to negotiate the rocky path to adulthood, which naturally involves love and sex. She is pretty underwhelmed with sex with her boyfriend Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte) and before long ends her relationship with him. Adèle is bowled over one day when she catches a glimpse of a beautiful blue-haired woman in the street, and when her friend takes her to a gay bar one night she meets her again. The woman with the blue hair is named Emma (Léa Seydoux) and as their meet-cute turns to friendship and then something more, Adèle falls, and falls hard, for Emma.

There is some friction between Adèle and her friends when her romantic involvement with another woman becomes impossible to hide, but this is not a film about the struggle for equality LGBT people face; it is about a young person falling in love for the first time. Adèle and Emma become lovers, and there are undeniably some very graphic sex scenes. To be honest, I don't think the film would've lost anything if they were a little shorter and a tad less graphic but, as explicit as they are, they have the affect of underlining the intense nature of their relationship. Emma is a little older and more experienced than Adèle and so it seems clear to me that while Emma is certainly committed to Adèle, she isn't quite as hopelessly infatuated. Emma is clearly a passionate person, but while it seems Adèle burns brightly for Emma and Emma alone (even as she leaves school and begins work as a teacher it seems clear that her heart and everything else is given over to Emma), Emma is an artist and finds joy and passion in other things as well as Adèle. When Emma starts spending a lot of time on a new project, it causes Adèle to feel like she's being left behind.

Adèle is broken.

Adèle, feeling lost without her lodestone, makes the mistake of beginning an affair with colleague Antoine (Benjamin Siksou). When Emma discovers what she has done, she breaks up the relationship and throws Adèle out, in an extended scene which is gut-wrenching. The final part of the film follows Adèle as she tries to come to terms with the break-up and face the prospect of life alone, or, at least, life without Emma, which for Adèle, amounts to pretty much the same thing.

I remember with crystal clarity the feelings that come with falling overwhelmingly in love with someone without enough life experience to really process it; I fell for the woman I would eventually marry when young and at college. At some point after graduating University, Rach had a work placement in Ringwood near Bournemouth. She loved it, and she felt joy and growth and new experiences and was enjoying every second while I sat around at home and missed her. It was almost like I could feel her slipping away and the thought of not being with her was more than I felt I could bear. I remembered these feelings intensely when watching Adèle, feeling like Emma was slipping away, make her mistake, and felt such empathy.

I watched Adèle go through the outcome that once scared me more than anything, and the pain feels genuine. She's adrift, alone, with nothing but a hole where she was once whole. It is hard to watch, and I wondered at one point if she was going to end her life. She doesn't, but I get the distinct impression she was considering just letting herself float out to sea and leaving it all behind. As the film ends, Adèle is still hurting.

Adèle just wants to drift away.

Of course, the reception the film got shows I'm not the only person to be affected by the film in such a way, but the fact that these feelings are commonplace makes them no less powerful, and this is not the first film to tackle such a subject. The difference is the way it is made. The camera is obsessively infatuated with Adèle; as in love with her as she is with Emma. The close ups are so close, and the camera lingers on her for so long, and the scenes are so intense, that you feel a part of the intimacy; it is potent. Adèle Exarchopoulos is so mesmerising to watch, so expressive that even when Adèle is heartbroken, the camera pours obsessively over the contours of her face. It's astonishing, but only because she's astonishing. She and Léa Seydoux are fully deserving of the rare exception of sharing the Palm d'Or with director Kechiche at Cannes 2013.

Prepare to have your heart broken, but it is so worth it.

Score: 9/10

The reviews out there, quite rightly, do tend to have reservations about the most controversial aspects of the film. This review from Kristin at Film Comment highlights problems with the way the film sometimes feels like an observance of a lesbian relationship from a straight male perspective, but does acknowledge its strengths as well, calling it 'memorable but flawed'. This one from Tim at the Telegraph is also positive, but based on his opinion on the second half, it didn't strike the chord with him that it did with me.