Directed by:
Abdellatif KechicheCinematography:
Sofian El FaniCast:
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Salim Kechiouche, Jeremie Laheurte, Catherine Salée, Aurélien Recoing, Benjamin Siksou, Alma Jodorowsky, Sandor Funtek (more)Plots(1)
15-year-old Adèle dreams of finding the love of her life. When she meets Thomas - a dark, handsome, friendly stranger who falls for her instantly - her dream seems to have come true. But an unsettling erotic reverie upsets the romance before it begins. Adèle imagines that the mysterious, blue-haired girl she encountered in the street slips into her bed and possesses her with an overwhelming voluptuous pleasure. She can no longer deny her true desires - Adèle likes girls. Then the gorgeous, sensual blue-haired girl reappears. and approaches her. A passionate and chaotic love story has begun... (Wild Bunch Distribution)
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Reviews (10)
It’s very rare to see a festival flick so relatable, with artistic choices that fully support the power of the message and the emotional effect. The three-hour series of details on the faces of actors, whose ordinary activities deliberately don’t deviate from the process of the heroine’s development, may have some passages that are almost unnecessarily long, but the creator would be able to justify them without hesitation. We are not only watching Adele, we are Adele and we are experiencing with her tense moments as participatorily as the film medium will allow. The sex scenes are perhaps too long, but also inevitable, given the consistency of the process of following the internal and sexual development of a fragile heroine, and they are also pleasant for the male viewer (both actresses not only act great but look great, too). Sexuality can be a heavy burden and here we see it unadorned and very realistic. 85%
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What to say about a movie that lasts three hours and you're not bored for a minute, in fact, you'd gladly watch another hour... A very impressive, extremely intense, and thoroughly immersive cinematic experience! That's how I want to express my feelings. Moreover, the actress playing the lead role could not have been better chosen, as she did not just play Adèle, she lived her. I could go on and on about the story of the intimate lesbian relationship between Adèle and Emma, with a lot of great dialogue, but I don't think it would do much good. It can't be told because it has to be seen to understand the genius of this emotionally intense relationship film. (95%)
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If this movie were about a teenage hetero couple, it’d be mundane and uninteresting. If it were about two gay boys, it’d be unwatchable for most viewers. But it’s about two lesbians and the Cannes jury, led by the king of Hollywood, awarded it the Golden Palm. Like Linklater’s three-hour- long Boyhood, the three-hour-long Blue is the Warmest Color slowly and not too dramatically talks about everyday life issues. But unlike Boyhood, it focuses on one particular stage in the main character’s life and goes so deep that the last part of her story moves the viewer to tears. Because we all know how that hurts, no matter what our sexual orientation is. The sex scenes are very open, but not self-serving. On the contrary, they are very important for the physical and emotional absorption of the story, which is its alpha and omega. The central duo of young actresses is incredible in every word, feeling and look.
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From the very first moment, you can tell that this was directed by a creator who knew exactly how to handle every scene. If he wanted to portray desire, he did it perfectly, but equally so boredom, hesitation, inability to fit in with the group, the beauty and spontaneity of lovemaking, as well as the sweatiness and speed of sex. It’s three hours long, yet every scene is in its rightful place. You don't even want to believe it until you see it. And what's the best part? Abdellatif Kechiche simply depicted things (relationships) as they are, without embellishment, just being realistic, which sometimes means being harsh. It doesn't have to look nice, but why not capture reality as it sometimes is? Thanks to Adèle Exarchopoulos, you see how many dimensions human nature can have. We're not just good or bad; sometimes we're repulsive, sometimes devoted, sometimes naive, sometimes foolish, sometimes completely indifferent, and other times... different. One person can do it all. Abdellatif Kechiche convinces me, especially after Black Venus, that the audience can tolerate reality and it doesn't have to be exaggerated; sometimes it's enough to simply let the camera watch. Still, I can't help but feel the length is excessively long.
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Blue Is the Warmest Colour takes a complex approach to depicting several developmental phases in the life of a girl who is becoming a woman. Kechiche could have shown only cause, effect and consequence, but he is more interested in the process and the course of the transformation itself, as well as its duration. Length is one of the many tools that the director uses to break down the barrier between the movie 90 protagonist, Adele, and the viewer. ___ A good eighty percent of the dialogue (and thus of the whole film) is handled through close-ups of faces. The traditionally rendered dialogue scenes consistently reassure us that reality continues outside the frame of the picture. Conversely, we are given the impression of being enclosed in a small space that is more or less defined only by the actors’ bodies. Ignoring the surrounding environment intensifies our connection with the characters, whose intimate zone limits what we see and hear. The distancing of the camera from the character at the end of a dialogue scene then serves as a liberating means of stepping out of the inner universe of interpersonal relationships and into the outside world. Whether the characters’ communication, be it verbal or non-verbal (including sex), is conveyed using the shot/countershot technique or through panning, also plays a role. However random it may seem, the form is always under the director’s control, fully subordinated to the process of bringing the characters together and distancing them both physically and mentally. ___ In multiple senses, a line is crossed during the erotic scenes (love and sex, reality and pretence), each instance of which has its own justification (for example, the sharp contrast between a moment of extreme intimacy and the following scene of a family birthday party, which requires far more pretence). The explicitness of the erotic scenes raises legitimate suspicion of voyeurism on the part of a tyrannical director (whom both actresses have described as a genius, though they no longer want to work with him), while their unusual length is the most extreme expression of the film’s unwillingness to pretend anything in communicating with the viewer. It is no coincidence that Blue Is the Warmest Colour also addresses the limits of honesty of representation (whether in film or in other arts) in dialogue that never descends into café blather that would only serve to demonstrate the filmmaker’s intellectual prowess. References to films such as Pabst’s Pandora’s Box reasonably complement the main motifs of the narrative and concurrently help us to understand the characters outside of the relationship context. ___ I don’t know of many films that could go this deeply and with such physical urgency under the skin of the main character. In my case, the idea of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” was manifested with extraordinary intensity. After three hours, I was glad to start living my own life again, but my connection with Adele definitely did not end with the closing credits. 85%
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