Blue Is The Warmest Color

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, the two young actresses who star in Blue Is The Warmest Color, deserved to share the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year with the director, Abdellatif Kechiche. In fact, I think they might have deserved more of a share than he did. Kechiche’s range of expression isn’t much more expansive than Christopher Nolan’s; his camera has a hammerlock on the girls, and most of the film’s storytelling relies on reading their faces, and, to a lesser extent, their bodies—which the director likes to have wiggling on top of one another, in the buff. In this context, I don’t think that the NC-17 material is pornographic, exactly, but it sure is an easy way for the movie to generate publicity for itself in a critical environment primed to hail girl-on-girl booty-slapping progressive. The shrewdness of making an art film with explicit sex scenes between two gorgeous women in 2013 and passing it off as radically broadminded (Kechiche to Reuters: “Everyone who is against … love between two people of the same sex must see the film”) reminded me of Beyoncé releasing her surprise album earlier this month and bemoaning that music these days is “all about the single, and the hype is so much that it gets between the music and the artist and the fans”—as if the surprise stratagem wasn’t a different form of hype that just so happens to have saved her millions of dollars. I think there’s more to what Kechiche is doing than that—but maybe not enough more.

The French title translates as “The Life of Adèle, Parts 1 and 2,” and I think I liked Part 1 better. In these scenes, Adèle (Exarchopoulos) is about 17; she has a pretty, gamine, chipmunky face, hair she must soak in a deep fryer, and a jaw that hangs down stupidly, as if her lower teeth were dumbbells. Adèle is not stupid, but she seems as intent on closing herself off as she is on opening up books. Nothing seems to draw her to her female friends; she doesn’t break the mold at family dinner, which her parents spend speechless, slurping spaghetti, in thrall to the TV; and when she finally gives in to the advances of a meatheaded but kind upperclassman, she’s terrified to find herself going through the motions, and that those motions produce no heat. When she confesses these perceived failings to Valentin (Sandor Funtek), her gay best friend, one can tell that she isn’t falling on her words here for want of trying; suddenly, she notices the ickiness of her hair. Funtek conveys his character’s gayness very subtly, and though out-and-proud Valentin offers Adèle some consoling words, it’s impossible to tell just how much he knows, even if it’s quite possible to induce how little she lets him know. Curiously, the gay club he takes her to is lighted mainly blue, but the lesbian equivalent into which she strays is the warmest, mellowest yellow. The blue is in Emma’s—Seydoux’s—hair as she approaches Adèle at the bar. I think the closed-in camera achieves intimacy with the adolescent girl here; I think it does so, and gives the lie to her solipsism, when Adèle brushes past her old friends to meet with older Emma in the school parking lot; and when she denies, later, what they met for.

The blue in Emma’s hair is artificial, but the blue in her Buddha eyes is not, and the dissonance alone is striking enough to pierce Adèle’s heart. She’s studying to be a painter, and her butch look is an invention: the chassis of an android from some better time and place than Adèle’s lower-middle-class naturalism. (This isn’t always the case, but Emma’s blue hair sends the opposite signal that a collar of the warmest color would.) Emma is the aggressor, the buyer of Adèle’s drink, and she senses that Dorothy has wandered in from Kansas. They talk Sartre and art, sketch (Emma) and get sketched (Adèle); and we see them suddenly transition from a kiss in the park to bliss in the bed in what Richard Brody calls “one of the most jolting cuts in the recent cinema.” But I disagree with him that the “intermediate stages of seduction or proposition” are skipped. It’s an earned release, for the girls and for the viewer—a resolution to an hour’s worth of ardor that radiates without getting lost and yet is finally found. (He is correct that “the sexual teasing of anticipation or [the] buildup of undressing” aren’t there, but that’s a different story. Adèle is too serious for teasing foreplay; what makes her sexy, perhaps, is her absence of wit, her absolute, unconscious liberation from the world of wit, which is to say: the world.) No, we don’t see them take their clothes off; but Adèle has been naked since Emma laid eyes on her, a meet-cute in a dream that Adèle later made wet.

I found a lot to like in Part 1. I like very much Kechiche’s vision of modern, multicultural France—the filmmaker himself is from a Tunisian background—with links to another Palme d’Or winner, The Class, and to pride parades and austerity measures, and yet almost no connection to the Internet or smartphones, and to the new and widely discussed ways in which kids—and particularly queer ones—experience courtship from behind screens. (Not that those uncanny, sealed-off rites would make for better drama.) I think Exarchopoulos and Kechiche and Seydoux are extraordinarily sensitive to the fear, at a certain age and in a certain sensibility, of being watched. There’s an exquisite horror attached to young love for a person like Adèle; and the director’s style—which has been acclaimed in terms like “raw” and “relentless” and “obsessive”—is rightly constricting, just as the schoolgirl’s chest must feel constricting to her heart. But Part 2 suffers because Adèle’s life changes and yet Adèle herself does not.

In fact, I would go so far as to say I liked Part 1 better because I don’t think there really is a Part 2. Ed Gonzalez calls Kechiche “a rhythm man,” but not a poet, and I believe Part 2 suffers from the stunting of the former and his inability as the latter. Adèle is filled to the brim with desire and longing, but this three-hour movie has almost no romance—and that may be why The Master kept me rapt throughout its duration while Blue became a slog. It is one thing to have such intermediate factors as flirtation and undressing removed to heighten the final bridging of the girls’ passions; but when you only show of their relationship the opposite of what old films, way back when censorship was still a thing, showed to spotlight the sexual tension between a Cary Grant and a Rosalind Russell, you’re still not giving a full picture. Flirtation occurs when animal passion becomes social, and lust turns to love. (This couple isn’t playful, but don’t they ever fight? There’s passion in their sex, but, after their first bout, not in anything else.) Blue uses a hokey metaphor about how the ingénue will “eat anything” (srsly?!) but oysters, but the analogy is inapt: Even after she dines on them at the home of Emma’s art-collecting, wine-quaffing, culture-vulture parents, Adèle still doesn’t come out of her shell. I appreciate that she doesn’t object to “coming out” for any explicit, external reason. (There’s a scuffle between her and her clique of schoolyard negligibles, but their jeunes-filles ignorance is played almost as comedy; and Adèle’s briefly glimpsed family seems conventional but loving.) But whereas Brody can write off such omissions as her coming out to her intimates, too, to an abstract “mind-body question,” I sensed a vacuum in the story. It is one thing for us to accept Adèle’s uncommunicative sexual confusion, her refusal to write for a public audience, etc., but it is another for Emma to be so complacent about it. She’s increasingly sphinxlike; Adèle doesn’t understand the art world that Emma is part of, and maybe neither do the filmmakers. When Adèle goes to a museum, all she sees are depictions of boobs and butts.

I think I might be rebelling against a subtext that, taken in comparison with, say, Children of Paradise (1945), is not very French. I made a rather unfair crack earlier that compared Kechiche to Christopher Nolan because the Frenchman keeps his camera jammed up in the girls’ faces—this might be what’s alluded to as “relentless”—and keeps those faces running like factories for mucus and tears. Blue Is The Warmest Color, in all its flesh and fluid secretions, is a very physical movie; either Kechiche does not believe in love’s spiritual dimension or he’s left it to the lead actresses, and wants to examine the surfaces of their feelings under his microscope. Possibly, he’s trying for the sense of refinement that Michael Haneke found in Amour—but I found the psychology of Haneke’s film to be more convincing, or, at least, more engaging. (I wanted to dump namby-pamby Adèle long before Emma did.) Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, however, are absolutely stunning in how much they reveal; this is clear in Part 1, and toward the end, when Adèle feels up Emma at a café, trying to reconcile with her after having cheated on her with a male coworker, and Emma demurs, sadly, pitifully, having gotten over Adèle just enough to beg her to stop, but no more. Exarchopoulos is so full of longing she’s like an addict needing a fix and the residue of love in Seydoux glows like moonlight; her short hair makes her look like Falconetti as Joan of Arc. Mon Dieu, love hurts.

And maybe the other thing I’m rebelling against has been prefigured early on, in Adèle’s secondary-school class and by way of a rather elementary technique. Her teacher asks whether love makes one empty or full, and I finally know the answer to that in Adèle’s case. Without her love for Emma, she’s empty, practically a cipher. (Comparing her to famous literary heroines, A.O. Scott says “her life is also yours.”) That might be tragic—it certainly seems so when she walks away from a viable love interest, at the end, because we know she will never fully recover from the love of her life—but it isn’t necessarily dramatic. Blue Is The Warmest Color has passion for its own painful sake.