Step away from the controversy – over extended sex scenes,
over contentious working conditions behind the scenes, and over a vicious
insult-trading press tour – and it’s easy to see Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color for what it
really is. It’s a coming-of-age first-love story of uncommon patience and with a
central performance of uncommon depth of feeling. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as
Adèle, a young girl in her late teens who is slowly discovering who she is,
exploring possibilities. A disappointing short relationship with a young boy
from school is unsatisfying. She’s still reeling from that when, out walking in
her French hometown, she spots Emma (Léa Seydoux), her hair dyed bright blue
allowing her to stick out of a crowd with ease. Adèle soon finds herself in a
position of dating this bold twentysomething lesbian, a situation to which she
feels far more simpatico, even if it leaves her schoolgirl pals behind,
confused and maybe even a little jealous. It’s a story of first love that
slowly fades over the course of a nearly three-hour runtime into a story of
maturation, a trickier subject, to be sure, and something that benefits from
the film’s length and comfortably languid pace.
The course of most first loves are similar, in movies and in
life. The initial blushing friendship and attraction snowballs into romance,
all consuming, and then, inevitably, the couple parts ways. Kechiche, who
co-wrote the screenplay with Ghalia Lacroix from the graphic novel by Julie
Maroh, views the details within that basic structure with a fussy naturalism,
the camera bobbling ever so slightly as it keeps its characters in tight close-ups
when it’s not floating along behind them, wandering through their lives in
medium shots. It’s all very of the moment, shaky with a sense of discovery as
these two young women drawn to each other through conversation about art and representation,
philosophy and literature, life plans made and unmade, exploring new ideas and
each other, body and mind. This isn’t just any love story. It is theirs. Adèle
is self-conscious, something of an innocent, blushing, complaining one morning
to a close friend about her sloppy fashion and slick hair. Emma, on the other
hand, is confident, pursuing the relationship with a happy eye towards
encouraging her girlfriend’s sense of excitement and discovery.
What’s remarkable about the film is hardly the filmmaking,
which has all the standard at-a-remove-but-not-impartial deliberateness of the
typical European melodrama, slickly restrained and tasteful, except when it
comes to shamelessly appreciating the female form. Nor is it the screenplay,
which has some nuance, overtly thematic conversations aside, and a generosity
of length and incident, but accumulates details, like a homophobic face-off on
a high school blacktop, that nod in directions it’s otherwise uninterested in
exploring, and features a scene in a gay bar filled with comically exaggerated
lesbian caricatures, our leads excepted. No, what’s remarkable is the lead
performances, two feats of warm-hearted precision acting from two young women
with wide-open expressive faces, totally unselfconscious in their every
movement and gesture.
Seydoux has a nicely controlled sense of coiled energy that
radiates upward out of her shock of blue hair. She’s appealingly unpredictable
and yet, at the same time, a seemingly safe first love. But it’s Exarchopoulos
who steals the show here, as well she should given her protagonist is on screen
in practically each and every second of the runtime. She’s delivering an
extraordinarily empathetic and fully felt performance, physical and emotional
at once at all times. Her character is a girl of huge appetites, reading large
novels lost in their worlds of words, slurping down her meals with explicit and
exuberantly sloppy chewing, crying with tears and snot clumping up on her
smooth cheeks, and, yes, having sex with intensity and passion in sequences
that last exactly as long as they need to and then a few minutes more.
What could be standard coming-of-age doodling is elevated
through these deeply felt and wholly convincing performances that play off of
each other with natural complexity and ease. The directing and the writing
wisely give over all the time and attention to allowing these women the space
to breathe and grow and change without much in the way of embellishment or
exaggeration. Because the camera sticks so close to Adèle for so long and
through so much, the film accumulates a sense of her personhood that feels
uncommonly fully formed. In the days since I saw the film, I’ve found myself
wondering about the characters as I do people I know. I wonder what they’re up
to now. I wonder if they’ve found their place. I wonder if they’ve become who
they want to be.
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