First love—passionate love—is the ultimate feeling, if there is one. Blue Is The Warmest Color is a story about the intense and life-defining experience of a first love. It’s a beautiful, highly sensual film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. In 2013, it won the Palme d’or at Cannes.
The film tells the story of Adèle (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high school student who, after briefly dating a boy and later sneaking a sweet kiss with a girl, falls in love with an alluring blue-haired beauty. The film introduces Adèle by showing us a typical day in her life. Kechiche follows Adèle through the mundane events of her day at school and home, mainly by looking at her face. The effect of these close-ups is not so much to give us an understanding of Adele’s internal life but to feel the power of her physical, sensual experience. This is evident by the type of actions in which we see Adèle: sleeping on the bus on her way to school, sitting through conversations with her friends, eating dinner with her parents, and sleeping again in her bed. The emphasis is on her body and its needs, and throughout these scenes, she is shown to be almost child-like, a pure being feeling her way through life.
After realizing she is not in love with the boy she’s dating, Adèle goes through a difficult crisis. She is confused about her feelings of attraction to another girl. Her confusion crystallizes into curiosity when she passes by a mysterious girl on the street. Later, on an outing with one of her friends, Adèle wanders into a bar. There she meets Emma, the beautiful girl she had seen on the street. Emma’s beauty and intelligence overwhelm Adèle. The close-up, up to this point focused on Adèle, becomes her gaze, as now we see Emma through her eyes.
A lover’s gaze…
It’s an actual meeting of opposing temperaments: Adèle is sensual and earthy, while Emma is cool and highly intellectual. But Emma, as played by Léa Seydoux, is also warm and nurturing, an irresistible combination for Adèle. The result of this meeting is explosive when they kiss and make love for the first time. This is the film’s subject matter: the euphoria of love and its effects on the senses. But it’s not just the love scenes that convey this: it’s scenes of long conversations to the sound of birds chirping in a park, a street march where couples dance and kiss to the sound of house music, a party where we see long conversations about art and philosophy in between huge plates of pasta. It’s beautiful, intense and immersive.
Immersive also are the movie’s much-talked-about explicit, long sex scenes. Their power is undeniable, but to reduce this movie to those scenes does no justice to Emma and Adèle’s story. However, to dismiss them would also be unfair. They are indeed beautiful, and their purpose is to show passion, desire, and fulfillment of this desire in the most idealized way. Still, sitting through a particularly long one, I couldn’t help but think of the controversy surrounding the film and the demands Kechiche placed on Séydoux and Exarchopoulos while shooting it (after the film came out, both actresses talked, not always in a positive way, about his excessive demands).
I guess the length of these scenes matches the level of detail we encounter in every other aspect of Adèle and Emma’s story. It also emphasizes that their relationship is based more on a meeting of the bodies than on a meeting of ideas: the intellectual Emma sees art and the pursuit of artistic expression as the highest of ambitions. At the same time, Adèle’s uncomplicated and practical approach to life leads her to a career as a preschool teacher. For Emma–we can see it in her eyes–this choice is unambitious and safe. This divide ultimately manifests itself in how they see their relationship: Emma holds it in an intellectual, still realistic, but also idealized place, while Adèle continues to base it on her intense fascination and physical need for Emma. In fact, Adèle, despite going through an adult sexual relationship, never seems to age: she remains a child, open-mouthed and hungry, which weakens the story in the end.
At almost three hours, the film has an accumulative effect. We have seen so much of Adèle and Emma’s relationship; the feeling is of having lived through it all. In the end, the close-up opens up, and the pain is in the distance, to see from afar the arm of your lover around somebody else’s waist. We feel the heartbreak, as we have deeply felt everything else.
The Things We Love 
Bello, Nene. Lo lograste! Un abrazo.
Gracias por leerlo!