Blue is the Warmest Color

Beyond “Blue is the Warmest Color’s” length, its country of origin, its intimate aesthetic or its controversial, NC-17 lesbian sex scenes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme D’Or winning film feels hardly like an art house movie at all. It’s groundbreaking in the way that this love story of two lesbians, a subject so often embroiled in politics, oppression and hardship when seen in the movies, can feel so ordinary.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is a life story, a story of a relationship; it’s a romance, a coming-of-age teen drama, a tale of a woman’s journey or just about as close to a genre movie as you can get. That Kechiche and his two actresses, Adele Exarchopoulous and Lea Seydoux, get at this story with such honesty is good enough; it doesn’t have to be a “gay” movie.

The film follows the relationship of 17-year-old Adele (Exarchopoulous) and college art student Emma (Seydoux) over several years, exploring their intellectual chemistry, artistic and political forays and every inch of their passionate lovemaking.

The much-buzzed about sex scenes in question are so vivid, so steamy and so clear in depicting their naked bodies that it imbues the whole film with vigorous physical intensity. The first of three such scenes lasts for over seven minutes, forming a complicated web of body parts and arousal that leaves little to the imagination. Short of calling it pornography, the film in reference to these scenes could easily be called “Tangled Up in Blue.”

And yet their story itself is not as complex. Adele is a girl just discovering her sexuality. Her gossipy friends tell her that a hot senior has a crush on her, and when the two talk together on a bus, their conversation feels familiar. He plays guitar, she “likes everything” when it comes to music, they go out and share a few laughs, and when they finally have sex in a scene quite similar to those with Emma, if Adele is missing something, it’s not for a lack of physicality.

What Adele is missing is something intangible, and Kechiche will spend the course of three hours trying to piece together what that is. Some may criticize the film’s length, but then relationships take time.

Adele spots Emma walking down the street. Her messy blue hair stands out in a crowd, and Adele becomes a deer in the headlights. When she wanders into a lesbian bar unsure of what she might find or why she even belongs there, Emma is there almost like magic. In Hollywood this would be contrived; here it’s perfect.

Their interactions play out in real time, in a way. The dialogue by Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix feels almost intentionally modest, hitting lulls in conversation where another film would cut away or be notably more “written.” They talk about art, about their futures and about when Emma first discovered she was attracted to women, but Kechiche excludes any big speeches about their philosophies, about culture more broadly, and any bigotry and ridicule they might receive is almost completely out of the picture.

Before long the ability for either Emma or Adele to be dropped into the archetypal “leading man” role in such a romance is not a stretch. Emma starts painting Adele in the nude, and at a party in which Emma neglects Adele for other friends, she still praises her cooking and refers to her as “my muse.” When their relationship hits a rough patch, one flies off the handle in classical outrage.

And yet at no point is Kechiche trying to fit Emma or Adele into some male norm. “Blue is the Warmest Color” makes them into women and allows them to operate on normal terms, relating in ways that a man could never fully understand.

If the film is about capturing elusive sensations, then Kechiche speaks briefly through a man at Emma and Adele’s party. He’s an intellectual, art snob and scholar, and he explains how he’ll never know what it is for two women to love each other in that way. Men for centuries have used art to depict women’s bodies and their kinship, never grasping it fully. Those sex scenes, which many have complained are too pornographic and too close to what a man desires from lesbian porn he can find online, is not some ideal vision of reality and how most have sex but more accurately Kechiche’s imperfect portrait, a man desperately trying to capture what his two characters might feel.

Thankfully with the help of Exarchopoulous and Seydoux, Kechiche gets closer than any man before. The two have as much personal chemistry as they do physical. Their physical and internal transformations are visible in subtle ways, and they hardly seem to be acting at all.

On Emma and Adele’s first meeting, Emma draws her new friend in profile. “It’s a sketch and it needs some work,” she says. That one line speaks to the whole film’s character growth. This life is a work in progress. “Blue is the Warmest Color” finds its notes of beauty through its imperfections, turning this paint by numbers romance into a sketch of something so much more.

3 ½ stars