(Abdellatif Kechiche, France, 2013)
Blue is the Warmest Color is an arduous love story between Adele, a young and newly self-realized lesbian and Emma, a more seasoned and experienced one. The film tightly tracks the blossoming, flourishing, then diminishing of the relationship between the two throughout it's 187 minutes of running time, specifically from the perspective of Adele. We witness as Adele falters throughout teenage hood, sexually experimenting with a boy in her school and going about a pretty average life before she encounters Emma (a blue-haired college art student) on the street and shares with her a profound, puzzling gaze of attraction. Eventually, Adele propels herself into an environment in which she meets Emma and the two become entwined in a highly eroticized yet compassionate relationship, lasting several years. The fact that Emma becomes somewhat bored with Adele's rudimentary knowledge in the arts and overall disinterest in the things Emma is most attached to is knowledge reserved for the audience and is only revealed to poor Adele in a the form of Emmas questionable attachment to another "friend". This adulterous speculation propels Adele to cheat on Emma. With a man. Emma finds out, they have a very realistic fight and Emma kicks her out, leaving Adele sobbing miserably in the street.
There were some moments where I found myself relating to Adele's predicament and felt pity for her obliviousness. Anyone who has been broken up with realizes afterwards that the relationship was sizzling out for the other person for some time before the breakup actually commenced and seeing Adele desperately trying to hang on to something Emma knows is dead is quite heartbreaking. As I said, the scene in which they break up is extremely well-acted and realistic, the sheer devastation of being broken up with is exposed in all of it's grotesque selfishness and melodrama, a part we've all played. The other effective scene takes place in a cafe, seemingly some time after Emma has broken up with Adele and since moved on to a relationship with the woman Adele suspected of her having an affair with. Adele, not having moved on, desperately pleads with Emma to re-ignite their relationship and attempts to reel her back in by engaging in a momentary burst of sexual passion. As Emma pulls away and admits that she can't continue because she no longer has love for Adele, the well-acted pathetic nature of begging for someones love engages one with the familiarity of the scene and once again slightly pulls on one's heartstrings.
Perhaps after the breakup scene is where the film began to lose my interest, seeing as it entails one of the last dramatics beats before the cafe scene. By the end I found myself watching it for the sole purpose of finding out what happens to Adele, despite already knowing where her road leads by having walked down a similar path. My initial response to the film was more than underwhelmed, the only emotion that effectively lasted throughout and after the long film was sheer boredom. My boyfriend even mentioned that the film left him feeling so restless that he wanted to run laps. Now, usually I would never criticize a film for it's length or for a slow-moving plot, I find that these characteristics usually embody a film that has a lot to say and is dedicated to consuming the viewer into it's world, but this movie was just way too long. My boyfriend and I desperately chuckled at the pointlessness of an (approximately) ten minute scene in which Adele is teaching children how to write a sentence in school. Although I understand now, after reading this review from 'Variety', that every seemingly-insignificant detail is a paint-stroke in the portrait of Adeles somewhat tragic life, I (perhaps unfortunately) never found myself truly caring for her as a character, which made all of these irrelevant scenes revealing her as a complex character to be arduous and unnecessary. Besides, in the scenes of that nature Adele was only concealing her misery, doing her job, resisting the urge to burst into tears.
Another aspect of the film which the Variety review illuminates for me is the disingenuous nature of the sex scenes. To para-phrase the criticism explored by the review, the audience sees Adele as an awkward teen, gingerly discovering her sexuality until it explodes into a lengthy sex scene between her and Emma. My problem with this scene (as well as Debruges, the author of the Variety review) is not it's all-revealing nature, but how it starkly deviates from how the rest of the film is shot. Up until that point and for the rest of the film, we witness the events of Adele's life unfold with a close proximity to her character. The film is mostly comprised of tracking shots and close-ups of her face. Adele is always closed-in and dominating within the frame. Then, all of the sudden, the camera becomes objective when Emma and Adele have sex. The perspective is no longer forcing us to focus on Adeles experience and instead we witness their having sex at a conventional "pornographic" distance. Everything is shown, nothing is concealed, and all of the sudden Adele is a master at sex even though she's essentially loosing her virginity. The awkward moments of fumbling, mishandling or just plain going at it wrong which are unarguably present throughout a first-time sexual experience are completely ejected and replaced with an all-too-perfect (hence, "pornographic") portrayal of sex. I know that it's a movie, it's not supposed to always seem real. However, the way the sex scenes are shot are just inconsistent with how the rest of the film is, exemplifying the fact that a straight man directed this film and finding it hard for me to believe that he wasn't aroused by these scenes and didn't intend for others to be as well (the director also had a creepy obsession with the actress who played Adele which is more elaborated on in the Variety review)
The notoriety and critical praise of this film really escapes me, the fact that it won the Palme 'dOr being the reason I went to see it in the first place. Sure, I guess it deserves mention for displaying homosexuality in a mostly normative light is significant, but Kechiche (the director) couldn't help himself when it came to portraying lesbian sex objectively and from a distance rather than from Adeles perspective like how the rest of the the film is shot, giving the sex scenes a more pornographic edge than a artfully-cinematic one. Not to mention the cheesy not-so-homo-normative tactics in the film that Kechiche injected just to make sure you absolutely are sure of how gay Emma and Adele are, mentioned in the positive New Yorker review.
I wouldn't say that Blue is the Warmest Color isn't worth watching, but don't allow yourself to get caught up with how progressive it is to make a movie about a lesbian couple dominate your perspective. When it came to portraying the tragic ups and downs of a long-held relationship between two very different but very in-love people it was realistic and at times heart-breaking but where it intended to enrapture me with three hours of what the director believed to be an expose of Adele's ceaseless beauty and emotional hardship it pretty much failed, I couldn't wait for it to be over.
Also, here is a hilarious article/video of what some lesbians thought of the sex scenes.
