Abdellatif KechicheBlue Is The Warmest Colour

Blue is the Warmest Colour manages a similar feat. Taking a three-hour account of the highs and lows of an all-consuming first love between two women, director Abdellatif Kechiche unearths a truth that speaks to everyone. Adèle (played to perfection by the phenomenal Adèle Exarcho-poulos) is a schoolgirl getting by in a nondescript Northern French town, uninspired by bored teachers and fumbling teenage boys. One day, a chance encounter with blue-hared art student, Emma (Léa Seydoux) changes her life forever. Thrown into a world

In Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s characters talk about the early days of a relationship as an opportunity to close the gap between the person you are and the person you want to be. The distillation of the early eggshell-steps of falling in love into one, simple idea was what made Haigh’s film resonate with audiences around the world. That the film’s characters were gay was incidental.

Words ByAvalon Lyndon

completely different from her own, Adèle trades family dinners in front of the telly for soirées with the artistic cognoscenti of Emma’s circle. Their differences are drowned out by the sheer electricity of their mental and physical attraction. But as the years pass, Adèle and Emma’s relationship struggles to weather the storms of adult life. Much of the film’s

staggering emotional impact rests on the shoulders of its young star Adèle Exarchopoulos. Whether she’s eating, crying, having sex or even sleep-ing, Adèle buzzes with an immense vitality. Everything about her looks exaggerated, with her bunny rabbit cheeks, big Bambi eyes and perpetually messy hair. You get the feeling that she feels things more intensely than most people. “It’s all

or nothing with you,” Emma remarks when they first meet, hitting the nail on the head. Like Adèle, the film courses with primal passions. Eating is voracious, messy; arguments come slathered in snot and tears, sound-tracked by catastrophic sobs; naked bodies are shot in extreme close-up, no soft-focus, nowhere to hide. In interviews, Exarchopoulos has

described how her audition with Kechiche consisted of them both sitting in a café, without talking, while he silently sussed her out. His camerawork does much the same thing: relentlessly observing, protective but voyeuristic. “It’s weird. It looks like me, but it doesn’t,” says Adèle when Emma sketches her for the first time, sat on a bench in the evening sun.

Like Kechiche and like us, Emma is entranced by Adèle, who becomes her muse. The portraits improve as the years go on, but what sadly becomes clear is that Emma is failing to see Adèle as she really is. What she sees instead is the person she wants Adèle to be. When they first meet, her naiveté charms Emma, who giggles when Adèle compares Jean-Paul Sartre to Bob

Marley. A few years down the line, this same naivety frustrates her. Push-ing Adèle to pursue writing instead of teaching, Emma urges her, “You should do something that you really like. I want you to be fulfilled.” Emma is blind to the fact that the philosophising and intellectual debate of her own art circle will never be what Adèle wants. In fact, it’s when Adèle is teaching that she

really comes alive. Surrounded by the children’s innocence and carefree energy, Adèle has a sense of purpose that is completely separate from Emma. For the first time, you can see her really growing up. While it’s a shame for such an intelligent and nuanced film to be dogged by scandal, it also hard to ignore the questions that have been raised surrounding Kechiche’s

punishing directorial style. Seydoux was quoted as saying that she would never work with him again. But strip away the gossip and in-fighting, and what remains is a love story: some-times gentle, sometimes brutal, never by numbers. Kechiche’s film gets to the heart of the agonies and ecstasies of falling in love for the very first time, and of the struggle not to lose yourself along

the way. If Weekend was about love allowing you to reconcile who you are with who you want to be, then Blue is about figuring out what is left when you give all of yourself to someone else. It’s a shame the surrounding scandal will probably have scuppered chances of a sequel. As a love story, Blue is captivating; as a character study, it’s a masterpiece.