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)VOD (4)
Plots(1)
French award-winning gay-themed drama directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. The film follows the 17-year-old closeted student Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos) as she pursues a passionate and fiery relationship with an older and 'out' blue-haired lesbian called Emma (Lea Seydoux). Throughout their relationship the two young women learn a lot about the pains and joys of being in love and the importance of staying true to oneself. (Artificial Eye)
(more)Videos (3)
Reviews (9)
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%
()
The problem isn’t in its (justified) enormous length, but it should have taken a break between chapters 1 and 2. A good few years too, to let Adele grow up, because it seems quite out of place when, in the second phase, the scarcely twenty-year-old girl plays a middle aged woman and all that was different from her teenage phase were the glasses. Another problem are the explicit sex scenes; how they were performed didn’t fit with the mood of the movie. More than anything else, it seems like Kechiche wanted to quench his thirst for slapping young meat on set. Paradoxically, the best bed scene was the dialog after the garden party. And not least is the problematic closing twenty minutes when it gradually fizzles out in a way quite unfair to the qualities of the rest of the movie. These difficulties still don’t outweigh the fact that there are still entire passages (enough to make a long feature movie) when the story of Adele and Emma’s relationship is unrivalled in authenticity, drawing the viewer through all of the good and bad emotions that are integral to any relationship. P.S.: If you are racking your brains about the role of the diary that there so much secret and important talk about, but then nothing (not even the MacGuffin), so I recommend finding out what work this is based on and what the narrative style the original is.
()
A film from the "life as it is" collection. This collection is starting to be very good because it counts the first episode of Nymph()maniac: Volume 1 among its number, just like Blue Is the Warmest Color. These protagonists need to be loved. And you need to walk through a piece of your own life with them. At the other end of the spectrum is the appeal of life arising from the youth of the protagonists of the Clip. It's not important where these protagonists come from, but what they do to hold up a mirror to us. And even if nothing else, the favorite problem of passionate relationships will always be about what to do with an initiated evening when our other half doesn't pay enough attention to us. Are the hook-ups and break-ups worth the momentary feelings of satisfied vanity? At the same time, I must add that I was very pleasantly surprised by the original comic, which can be read in English as "Blue Is the Warmest Color." The original is both more tender and more somber, Adèle has a different name and the film adaptation has deliberately abandoned some details and motifs from her life. But this mirroring has very naturally left the comic to live its own peculiar life, and if the film Blue Is the Warmest Color appeals to you even a little, read the comics because they are worth it.
()
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%)
()
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%
()
(less)
(more)
Ads