It’s not so very often that a character-heavy French film gets a largish release in the United States, especially when its director (Abdellatif Kechiche) and its stars (Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux) aren’t names that most Americans know. But when a film wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes and generates a bunch of buzz because of its lengthy and explicit lesbian sex scenes, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out why it’s an exception to the rule. Blue is the Warmest Color is the name of the exception we’re currently discussing, and you’ll probably be relieved to hear that it’s definitely the sort of movie that’s moving and beautiful enough to deserve the Palme d’Or, and it’s definitely a movie with sex scenes steamy enough to earn all of the blushes and whispering that it’s produced. Basically, it’s exactly the sort of thing that we turn to the French for.
The story introduces us to a high school girl named Adèle, who lives something of a normal middle class life, but who begins to find her normal existence turned on its head when a chance encounter with a comely, blue-haired lass in the street (Seydoux’s Emma) has her suddenly fantasizing about salacious encounters with the opposite sex. One thing leads to another and eventually we follow Adèle and Emma as they develop a relationship, which for Adèle is not just her first flirtation with lesbianism, but also her first experience learning to deal with all of the powerful, destructive emotions that come along with first love. For Emma there’s clearly love in the relationship too, but she’s a few years older, and her main conflict seems to come from the hardships of staying in a relationship because the sex is good, even though her partner is little bit high maintenance. Also, there’s a pretty substantial subplot wherein Adèle makes her way toward being a teacher of small children. But to pretend like Blue is the Warmest Color is about plot or story would be disingenuous.
What the film is really about is a capturing of emotion and a focus on the two main actress’ performances. That’s why basically the whole thing is shot using fairly tight closeups on the their faces. Maybe that doesn’t really make what this movie is clear enough though. Exarchopolous is probably in every scene in this movie, and every scene is literally almost entirely made up of closeups on her face that sit there and wait for her to decide exactly when and how to emote next. Filming this role must have been exhausting for her. The effort was worth it though, because other than the fact that some of the zoomed in shots of her eating or crying while snot bubbles blossom out of her nose get gross to look at, what she’s able to accomplish over the course of the film is damned impressive. The character is a little bit melodramatic, but Exarchopolous makes her vulnerable and relatable enough that you never turn on her. The character gets an oppressive amount of screen time, but Exarchopolous is so magnetic that you never get tired of looking at her.
Due to the way you’re constantly shoved up right next to Exarchopolous and due to the way that much of your time together is spent watching her break down into tears, become flushed with desire, or generally just have her entire body rocked by one feeling or another, the purpose of Blue is the Warmest Color eventually becomes its want to thrust you into the swirling, chaotic center of the human condition and leave you to drown there. The focus on bodies and the way they are affected by feeling is what leads to those lengthy and explicit sex scenes—one might even say that it's even what justifies them—and bless it for that.
As good as Exarchopolous is, Seydoux might be better. Perhaps that’s not fair, because
Exarchopolous is shouldering a lot more weight by being in every scene and playing a character who is always so flushed with emotion, and Seydoux comparatively gets to be much more reserved and is allowed to pick her spots to emote, but it’s hard to downplay how completely she’s able to disappear into her roles. I’ve seen her play a sexy and dangerous assassin of an indeterminate age in Ghost Protocol, and she pulled it off without any visible effort. I’ve seen her play an affable girl next door in Midnight in Paris, and she couldn’t have been more regular while doing it. What she does here allows her to fit comfortably next to every young, art student lesbian you’ve ever met in real life. To watch her play Emma is simply to watch someone play themselves. When you watch Exarchopolous’ performance, it’s clearly one worthy of praise, but to watch Seydoux act in this film is to not be able to detect any sort of performance at all, and that might be the best compliment that one can give to an actor. She steals the film.
All of that said, Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t some kind of wunderfilm that transcends its art form and completely transports you to another place. Shockingly, it’s fallible. It has its flaws. Firstly, along with the Adèle character, the film as a whole can get a little bit melodramatic. Adèle’s interactions with her high school friends and their reactions to the possibility that she might have a new lesbian friend were especially egregious. In true Anchorman fashion, things escalate quickly, and none of the drama that gets mined from the situation feels natural at all. Young people aren’t even prejudice against gay sex anymore. If anything, it’s probably considered a right of passage at this point, unless your story is set out in the boonies or something, which this one certainly is not.
Some pacing problems crop up as well, which probably isn’t a surprise coming from a character drama that has an 187 minute run time. This is a really long movie. Don’t take that to mean that there’s a ton of filler here. The film takes the lead character on a pretty lengthy journey and gives her quite a bit of development, to the point where you feel like you’ve watched several seasons of a TV show rather than just a standalone movie by the time you reach the end credits—but there certainly could have been some sequences that could have been cut down in order to get to that goal, or the endpoint could have been made a little less ambitious in order to keep the audience’s best interests at heart. Because, about two-thirds of the way through this one you suddenly realize how long it is, and you check the time fairly regularly afterward.
Even if you didn’t cut down the run time at all, inserting just a bit more of a traditional narrative into the screenplay would have probably helped out quite a bit. The pace of Blue is the Warmest Color is so lazy and the material it covers is so vast that you tend to get lost in it. It’s hard to tell how much time has passed or at what point of the story you’ve reached at any given moment. At one point you go from the first intimate moments of Emma and underage high school student Adèle’s relationship to a situation where they are living together and seem to have been doing so for a while, yet Adèle has still never met any of Emma’s friends. How much time has passed between these moments? A couple months? A couple years? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. There’s no clear endpoint to the story being told either, which is disorienting. The relationship at the center of the film is always imbued with a vague sense of doom and dread, but it’s never even clear why that’s just the case. Maybe it’s something that develops just because young love is always doomed? Either way, when a movie creeps over the three hour mark and doesn’t follow any sort of traditional storytelling structure, it’s bound to put a little bit of panic into its audience, and that definitely happens here. The human ass can only take so much inactivity, after all.
So, given the lengthy journey the viewer is asked to go on in order to complete this movie, what’s the point of the whole thing? What’s the big lesson you take away from it after experiencing everything it throws at you? Maybe that’s a question that can’t be answered. What you watch, in the end, seems to just be the simple story of a fairly normal girl experiencing her first love and stumbling her way toward building a career. It’s not something that you’ve never seen before, and it’s not something you’ve never seen accomplished by employing more brevity. It’s pretty undeniable that the bulk of what Kechiche has created here is mesmerizing and beautiful though. So much so that experiencing it is definitely worth the sacrifice of giving his film three hours of your time. In the end, the sex scenes might not end up being as essential to the heart of what this film is about as the buzz would lead you to believe, but why not let them act as your motivation to sit through all of the important stuff anyway? They really are damned sexy.
