By contrast, the shots of Adèle teaching get more and more tedious as the film drags on, but it’s in the classroom, when she’s working with young kids, that Adèle seems most at ease, most confident, and most grown up.īlue’s relaxed approach works beautifully elsewhere throughout the film. It’s also a point worth lingering on: At the party, Adèle seems out of place among Emma’s hip, intellectual posse, a perception that’s confirmed as it becomes one of many factors driving a wedge between her and Emma. This is Adèle trying on her grown-up costume-a change viewers might not notice if they hadn’t watched unadorned, babyfaced teenage Adèle messily eat meal after meal under a floppy up-do. Many months later, when Emma hosts a dinner party for her artist friends, Adèle puts on makeup, makes an elaborate meal, and ditches her usual sloppy-teenager bun.
All of these moments would feel more worth sitting through if they added up to something more devastating. Viewers can’t fully comprehend what Emma brings out of Adèle until they’ve seen her go from totally disengaged (at school) to orgasmically ecstatic (in the bedroom) to completely empty (whenever they're apart). Once their worlds collide, that look is replaced by in-the-moment vivacity that might have gone unnoticed had Blue skipped its “before” and focused only on “after.” Just as the sex scenes will likely elicit visceral reactions among the audience-the scenes are as sexy (attractive women convincingly getting turned on) as they are unsexy (so much saliva, so many noises typically left out of Hollywood love scenes)-they detonate a physical transformation in Adèle, too. All that time spent getting inside Adèle’s head is the price of admission for one the year’s best performances.īefore she meets Emma and all her blue-haired bravado, there’s a naive uncertainty about Adèle, a wistful teen who wanders through life looking like it takes all her concentration to remember to keep breathing. But they also serve an important purpose, establishing an emotional baseline that’s necessary to appreciate the film’s most affecting character developments. Many of these scenes are as beautifully shot as they are, frankly, boring. And while one of the film’s love scenes lasts a long seven minutes-or 10, 15, or 20, depending on whom you ask-it’s nothing compared to the film’s drawn-out displays of everyday monotony.
#Blue is the warmest colour hot movie#
The movie cozies up to Adèle quickly and doesn't let go, watching as she rides the bus and longingly stares out the window over and over again. It’s fitting that Adèle’s first date with the older, out art student Emma (Seydoux) finds her studying Adèle’s features for a portrait: The first act of the film largely does the same. The camera pauses on her blank stare in school, too, where she logs plenty of hours throughout the film’s six-year window, first as a student, then as a teacher herself, organizing nap time and administering dictation tests to first-graders-thrilling stuff. Kechiche’s affinity for extreme and often uneventful close-ups may demand a lot of patience at the surface level, but those scenes also help connect the audience to the characters in ways that are all the more rewarding. Despite all the buzz about its sexual content and off-screen squabbles, the seemingly most gratuitous parts of Kechiche’s film, which took the top honor at Cannes, are the least sexy. So is Blue is the Warmest Color indulgent? Absolutely, but in fact, the ways in which it's most indulgent aren’t all that titillating.
Watching Saturday Night Live Is Like Doomscrolling David Sims Co-stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux say they’ll never work with Kechiche again because of his on-set bullying, and it’s hard to ignore the film’s voyeuristic tendencies considering how much screen time it devotes to watching Exarchopoulos’s character (also named Adèle) fall fast asleep, mouth agape, lost in dreamland (not unlike how she looks when awake).
Some have accused the film of being an advanced exercise in the male gaze a queer romance filtered through straight people’s imaginations of what that should look like. As many other critics have noted, its sex scenes are as lengthy as they are explicit the author of the graphic novel upon which Blue is based has dismissed them as inaccurate pornography. It’s also arguably exploitative at times. French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial, three-hour coming-of-age love story jumps from close-up to close-up of characters eating, kissing, touching, tonguing, crying, and butt-slapping, all passionately and voraciously, often with little else in the frame. Watching Blue is the Warmest Color is an awfully carnal affair.
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