Review: Blue is the Warmest Color

by Trevor Kirkendall
★★★★

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is a bold film that explores the topic of blossoming love. It is delicately handled, beautifully shot, masterfully performed and extraordinarily engaging. To call the film a masterpiece would be selling it short. It’s a film of near perfection and difficult to believe two young actresses could actually pull off something so complicated with such composure.

Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) seems like a pretty typical high school student. She’s interested in literature, does well in her classes and has a good group of friends surrounding her. She has aspirations to become a teacher one day. It’s also about that time that she’s getting interested in boys. Or perhaps she feels like she’s at that time where she’s supposed to be interested. Her attention is drawn to a guy in her school, and he’s interested too. But something just doesn’t seem right when she’s with him.

By complete chance, she happens to pass by a mysterious and beautiful young woman with her hair dyed blue (Léa Seydoux). The two lock eyes with instant attraction and both linger inside each other’s gaze before continuing on their way. Adèle starts to question if she likes women rather than men. She’s not sure who this blue hair woman was or where to find her.

One night while accompanying a friend of hers to a local gay nightclub, she follows a group of women to a lesbian bar nearby. There she finds the girl with the blue hair who’s name is Emma. Adèle and Emma’s attraction to one another is instant, even if Adèle is a little reluctant to give into her desires. The two begin to spend time together before things begin to get a little more serious.

While “Blue is the Warmest Color” is about two women in a homosexual relationship, the characters themselves and the various aspects off a romantic relationship are all very relatable. The film follows our characters over the course of several years. Anyone who has ever been in a relationship of any kind with another person will be able to recognize the various stages Adèle and Emma’s relationship goes through. The ups and downs of being in love with another person are on full display here, and not once does it ever feel fabricated.

Director Abdellatif Kechiche has approached this story perfectly. It’s hard enough to convincingly portray one basic human emotion in a film. Kechiche has more than succeeded here. His film is a triumph, filled to the brim with so many different emotions associated with life and love: happiness and sadness, hopefulness and loss, kindness and anger, joy and desolation.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is more than just a film of scenes but a film of moments, much like life. This approach works because it keeps the film briskly paced. At 179 minutes, the film is by no means short, yet it rarely feels that long. One moment follows another with differing emotions and circumstances conflicting against one another. By juxtaposing these moments, we see how the love between these two can go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and back again. Every moment is loaded with plenty of subtext either through foreshadowing from a previous scene, or just the looks in each woman’s eyes.

Throughout the film, there are several moments that can be rather prolonged. Conversations between characters continue until there is nothing left to talk about. Sure, these scenes could have been trimmed to reduce the length of the film, but what purpose would that serve? Over the course of the entire movie, we find out so much about these two characters that it’s almost a shame the movie has to come to an end. I could have watched these two for another three hours.

While Kechiche’s direction deserves a lot of credit, it’s the two leading ladies that deserve the lion’s share. These characters are two of the most realistic and compassionate characters I’ve ever seen captured on film. Anyone can identify with aspects of this relationship, regardless of gender or sexual preference.  That’s not only a testament to Kechiche, but to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux too.

Seydoux plays the more dominate of the two characters. Being somewhat older than her costar, she’s portrays the role of the more experienced woman in the relationship perfectly and seems at great ease doing so. There’s less at risk for her in this relationship. She’s happy to have someone to be with, but at the same time has her own personal ambitions that are important above all else. Seydoux is very focused in this role.

On the other hand, Exarchopoulos is cautious and guarded. In public and around her friends, she’s happy, full of a lot of hope for the future. In private, she’s just another struggling teen, looking for an easy answer to the question of love. But her emotions run wild after meeting Emma. Exarchopoulos puts on one of the most fearless performances I’ve ever seen. She’s on camera for the entire duration of the film. She’s asked to strip down both emotionally and physically in ways that would make just about anyone think twice about taking this role. Not only is she successful in delivering such a raw performance, she adds so much realism that its hard to believe this person doesn’t exist. Every look in her eye, every nervous tick to straighten her hair, every tear running down her cheek contributes to the powerful performance. She draws us completely into this performance; we’re happy with her when she’s happy, and we feel the familiar pain of heartbreak with her too.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” isn’t only one of the best movies of the year, it’s one of the finest films I’ve seen. Never before have I seen a movie brave enough and ambitious enough to show the types of raw emotion that occurs within a relationship in this manner. A lot has been made about the explicit nature this film chooses to capture. While the scenes in question are extremely explicit and graphic, I think that they fit well within the framework of the film. For many, love doesn’t achieve a much higher level of intimacy and emotion than it does in those moments. While we’re allowed to watch Adèle and Emma in the most intimate and private of moments, it’s never perverse. It’s part of the natural progression a relationship takes and helps to solidify where their love is for one another. It’s balanced delicately against the rest of the film. This isn’t the centerpiece of the picture, but it is the emotional high. The film combines both the physical and emotional aspects of love, and it does so in such a way that you’re genuinely hoping for long lasting happiness between these two. It’s just too bad it’s only three hours long.