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Friday, November 1, 2013
MOVIE REVIEW Blue Is The
Warmest Color (La vie d'Adèle)
Waves Of Joy, Oceans Of Heartbreak
Adèle
Exarchopoulos as Adèle
and Léa Seydoux as Emma in Abdellatif Kechiche's romantic drama epic "Blue Is
The Warmest Color" (La vie d'Adèle).
IFC Films/Sundance Selects
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Friday,
November 1,
2013
It is very difficult to breathe during the three-hour epic "Blue Is The Warmest
Color" (La vie d'Adèle), and that's because we are
perpetually in the headspace of Abdellatif Kechiche and not necessarily the
characters in his film, based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel Le Bleu est une
couleur chaude. The camera invests in extreme close-ups. A lot
of them. We feel like voyeurs, not viewers. The film is the story of
Adèle, a high school teen who studies the book La vie d'Marianne and after a
series of encounters has a torrid relationship with Emma (Léa Seydoux), an older
lesbian art student.
Adèle, played wonderfully by Adèle Exarchopoulos in her debut lead role,
experiences a roller coaster of emotions. A junior, her heart is set
nowhere in particular. Adèle loves literature, and all music except hard
metal. "He's totally checking you out," one of Adèle's friends says of a
male senior who keeps stealing glances. Soon they date, but Adèle's eye
catches Emma, and a raw attraction explodes. Emotions percolate in
numerous characters, but for nearly an hour before Adèle and Emma first meet we
are treated to previews of their sexual entanglements, with Adèle masturbating
and daydreaming about Emma, who has short blue hair. Emma will be Adèle's
first true love, and lesson in heartbreak.
Throughout "Blue Is The Warmest Color", we see close ups of mouths eating,
mouths open with food in them. The more I looked at these mouths, the more
I felt I was looking at vaginas. This isn't because I'm a pervert.
It's because the psychological underpinnings and intellectual grounding of the
characters hasn't been sufficiently established. Adèle is smart,
intellectualizes and talks a lot about philosophy and feelings, and the film
exudes the latter, sometimes in powerful and passionate ways. Yet the
story itself, written by the director and Ghalia Lacroix, doesn't sufficiently
give Adèle a solid grounding. She looks like an abstraction, a symbolic
pawn in a chess game of erotica, but it isn't her's or Emma's game, it's Mr. Kechiche's.
Emma, focused on getting her art work installed, is seasoned, a sage who is
attracted to Adèle. "What are you doing by yourself in a dyke bar?", she asks
Adèle in the bar where they first meet. Soon they will have breathless sex, and
on at least three occasions, including one session that lasts four minutes
onscreen. Despite the explicit activity in "Blue Is The Warmest Color",
which won the Palm D'Or at Cannes in May, the scenes themselves are tame,
tasteful and as frenzied and intense as the film's other close-ups.
The sex, in context, though, is more natural than it is graphic, even with views
of female genitalia. The film and its content does not merit its NC-17
rating. A 12-year-old could see this film without issue. After all,
there's R-rated type graphic violence in PG-13 movies an under-ager could sneak
in to see.
My issue with "Blue Is The Warmest Color" is that there isn't a deeper
engagement in or a sincere exploration of female sexuality on anything other
than a carnal level. Sex involves the brain more than it does anything
else, and for all the verbalizing Adèle does in her emotional journey and that
of her literary doppelganger the film is wanting in a similar treatment of
women's sexuality. (The current film
"Concussion",
directed by Stacie Passon, does a far better job balancing sexuality through
physical and cerebral lenses in its lead female character who also has sex with
women.)
Men are visual creatures, women more literal and verbal ones, and cinema,
particularly here in Mr. Kechiche's hands, takes full and obvious advantage of
the former. It makes for a reinforcement of women as physical showpieces
rather than dimensional beings.
The sex scenes are the summer of Emma and Adèle's love, and the fall means an
emotional fall for Adèle, who would obviously say that blue is the color of her
true love's hair. In the third hour it becomes even more clear however,
that men, not women, are the focus of the director's film. One man,
Joachim (Stéphane Mercoyrol), spends
time being curious, wondering about the ecstasy of sex between women. "It
just seems that the orgasm for a women lasts longer and feels better than a
man's. And I'll never know what that feels like because I'm a man," he says
almost despairingly. It's here that the director's cards are bared for all
to see, for we realize that "Blue Is The Warmest Color", a well-intentioned, at
times enrapturing film, has been Mr. Kechiche's own private peep show all along.
Also with: Salim Kechiouche, Alma Jodorowsky, Benjamin Siksou, Aurélien Recoing,
Catherine Salée, Mona Walravens, Jérémie Laheurte, Sandor Funtek, Anne Loiret,
Benoît Pilot, Fanny Maurin.
"Blue Is The Warmest Color" is rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association Of America
for explicit sexual content, but it shouldn't be. Context is key.
The film is in the French language with English subtitles. The
film's running time is three hours.
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