Released in France as La Vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (The Life of Adele – Chapters 1 & 2), director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color tells the coming of age of Adele and of her exploration of sexuality and transition to adulthood. The story progresses from her relationships with a handsome but boring male classmate followed by with Emma, an artist from a nearby university, and of her progression from high school student to elementary school teacher. Seeing it back in November was the first time that I can remember being carded at a movie theater due to the film’s NC-17 rating for its sexual content, including a lovemaking scene between the leads that lasts 8 minutes. Over a month later I’m still not quite sure how I felt about it as a whole.
The central relationship is handled with honesty and sincerity, with its depiction of love, jealousy, heartbreak, and lingering feelings of longing. The lead actresses Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux deliver genuine, emotive performances: from Adele’s “love at first sight” moment upon seeing Emma in the streets to their intensifying feelings culminating in a lengthy love scene with their passions on full display, from Adele’s verbal and physical fight with taunting, homophobic classmates to Seydoux’s real fury in an argument that also turns physical, and the pervasiveness of depression and emptiness that come after heartbreak and the struggle to not let those feelings show.
The film comes at a time when gay marriage is a hot topic in contemporary politics. While it is not an explicitly political film, as a work that revolves around the socially relevant subject of same-sex relationships, it illustrates different reactions to and individual expressions of homosexuality, showing contrast between Adele’s modesty and Emma’s openness. The latter expresses herself through art, and her family is aware and very tolerant; having been taunted by her high school peers, the former chooses to hide her relationship from her parents. There is an awkward dinner where Emma pretends that they are friends because she is Adele’s tutor, and that she has a boyfriend who studies “business” while Adele’s parents go on about how being an artist is a poor career choice. Adele also hides her sexuality from her coworkers, including a male coworker who asks her out several times, and this eventually becomes a point of contention when her relationship with Emma begins to fray.
I got the feeling from the film, in the way it depicted the contrast between Adele and Emma, that there was some commentary on class. Adele comes from a family of modest means and even as she settles into a middle-class lifestyle, her teaching career promises neither fame nor fortune. That her parents and her career path are more conservative is implicit. Emma has a more understanding family and as an art student and artist, she gets to choose her peers in ways that her partner never had. That she would yell at Adele for being “ashamed” during an argument comes off as inconsiderate and hypocritical. Emma’s attitudes seemed like a sign of privilege, since her family appeared not only more tolerant but also more affluent. The very first time that she introduced Adele to her parents over for dinner, they had oysters; when Adele invited Emma over, their meal consisted of spaghetti. I learned from a friend that the French in general tend to not view oysters the same way as Americans, so I might have been reading too much into it through an Americanized lens with regards to the class context, but it’s hard to ignore that Emma’s family and peers always feel more high society.
Blue Is the Warmest Color is not lacking in passion and authenticity thanks to its leads, but clocking in at 2 hours and 59 minutes, it can feel sprawling and directionless. Covering Cannes for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that Blue Is the Warmest Color was “wildly undisciplined” and “overlong.” We often lose track of the characters, and even Adele’s parents are never mentioned again after a certain point for no reason. (She doesn’t even call them after she graduates and starts working?) Most other things, such as the way acquaintances may drift in and out of the narrative or Emma and Adele’s domestic drama, however, do feel pretty real to life. A lack of structure isn’t something I inherently dislike or else I’d hate Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming or Frances Ha, but it’s a problem when you are getting bogged down in minutiae, as Kechiche does here.
Critics and authors have also objected to directorial choices relating to content and camerawork, which have been criticized for voyeurism and portraying a male-centric perspective, designed solely to appeal to male viewers despite the subject matter. Julie Maroh, the writer of the graphic novel from which Blue is adapted, flat out called the depiction of sex “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.” There’s a whole other issue about depiction of sex in films and the line between art and pornography, but even without getting into all that, the sequence of Adele’s first time with Emma began to feel porn-y in part because it went on for so long, and the positions and reactions so over-the-top. I have to agree with Maroh that the scene felt “surgical” and “cold,” not because of the passions—the leads said that they had spent 10 days on this scene to get it right—on display, but because the way it was filmed made it all feel too much like we were just watching two women have intercourse for eight minutes.
Kechich has stated that he did not want to make a political film, but one scene felt like a reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity. Here, an art gallery owner in attendance at a party hosted by Emma and Adele delivers an impromptu speech in a way that calls back to Adele and Emma’s sexual encounter earlier about the depiction of female orgasms in art and why there is such a strong interest in the female form. A friend and I have both talked about the movie and felt that it was the director’s way of justifying and defending the film. It’s meta-commentary about the film’s importance done in a navel-gazing kind of way, but my problem with it is that it’s an act of mansplaining using a character who is said to be a big shot, a man with influence in the art scene and can exercise power over Emma’s career, and the entire thing is played straight without any trace of irony. It’s weird and creates this dissonance between what the film purports to be and what the scene conveys.
All of this is not to say that Blue Is the Warmest Color is bad. It’s flawed and has some problematic patriarchal undertones. The speech about female orgasm is one thing, but there’s also the issue that the modest Adele comes off more positively than the expressive, out in the open Emma, who has more moments of meanness and hypocrisy. I loved the performances, and even if I didn’t feel as engaged with the film as a whole, it’s socially relevant and worthy of respect as a daring project.
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