This is a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)
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28 November (updated 30 November)
* May contain spoilers *
This is a review of Blue is The Warmest Colour (2013)
This film does not drag, largely because one urges the development of the story between the two principals, but, at the same time, because the film is only incidentally 'about' them, it also feels somewhat hollow : at 105 minutes in, that seemed OK, and about right (when one knew that a screening that went in at 4.15 p.m. was not due out until around a titanic 7.35 p.m.), but then one was tempted to keep an eye on the time to guess how it would end.
When it ends, not with the flagged-up possibility (at which, even as a misdirection, one cringes), but just with a departing figure and a black-out, the next thing on the screen, in white on the black, is :
La vie d’Adèle
Chapitres 1 et 2
It felt like a mid-air ending, and this credit almost confirms that, as with the 600-page novel La Vie de Marianne (Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished book) that Thomas tries to read, this could be just part of a long story.
What is that story so far ? Roughly chronologically, it is set out here (for those who wish to see it), but there are various themes that emerge from the film in general :
Adèle makes a habit of walking out of social situations, and we see her at what seems her most relaxed when she is dancing (with men, largely ?), but she does confront her accusers at school in what is a scuffle. A scuffle with seemingly no consequences, although the feelings that others have about her would scarcely evaporate – director Abdellatif Keciche may think it immaterial to do more than show that such attacks exist in life, but treating it as if hostility from Adèle’s circle were a one-off that she would easily live with at school is fantasy. (Maybe we do not need to know, if she could not ride the storm, had to change schools, and her parents found out what it was about.)
Likewise, marching in support of LGBT causes and kissing in public – unless a distance away from Lille – is not going to be without ramifications, and, as mentioned, how long will Adèle’s parents be put off by Emma being ‘a friend’ ? Are these just dream-scenes, including the six or so graphic minutes of continuous sex, divorced from being real-life events ? If they meditate on anything, such as showing how Adèle’s parents shape what is probably an inferiority complex, they just subvert an unremittingly linear narrative and make it seem empty.
What fills it, with Emma’s face less so than with Adèle’s, are the screen-filling close-ups, so large that one is simultaneously torn, if reliant on the subtitles (maybe Keciche did not think of that), between reading them and adjusting one’s vision to the angle subtended by the large image : whereas, with a typical medium shot, specifically deployed as a departure in, amongst other places, the primary school, one can relatively easily switch between the shot and the next caption.
As against the head, or torso shots, at dinner with her parents, these vastly magnified images of Adèle (or Emma) constitute a form of immediacy, but one can hardly be unaware that the pair seems engrossing because there is nothing else to see, however winning Léa Seydoux’s smile (as Emma) may be. It does not hold up the film’s progression, but only a fluent speaker of French could have the full impact of the huge facial depictions and the dialogue.
As the film proceeds, Adèle comes in contact with Emma’s friends, seemingly, for the first time at the party that we see, where she broadly feels inadequate (as she appears to comment when undressing) – has she no way of knowing about herself (and saying to Emma) that parties are not her thing, rather than throwing herself into the catering as if she planned the whole thing ? (Whatever did happen with her one-time school-friends, Adèle does not appear to have asked anyone with whom she socializes, maybe because she does not, and Emma is all in all to her.)
Actually, she may have planned the whole thing as a way of meeting these friends, if Emma has not actually shared them – what we are shown does not give confidence that there is some thinking about the characters (which some call ‘a back story’), but one may come back to that being the point, that the situations are not doing more than drawing attention to their artificiality. (Probably not true, but this is an attempt to be charitable.)
At the end of the film, visiting Emma’s show, it is just more of the same, as if somehow Adèle thought that she would have Emma to herself – false expectations and inevitable disappointments.
A teacher in one of her classes at school had talking about Antigone, about childhood, and about tragedy being unavoidable – are we meant to recall that, and think of Adèle, being hurt and feeling outside life ? The title of the film then means that Emma, the blue-haired girl, was, she realized, all that she ever wanted.
Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays Adèle, is hardly off the screen, and is larger than life (literally, in character, although actually very reserved and even awkward). Seydoux and she* do a very good job of bearing the weight of this film, but, in particular, the scripting of the party scenes does not persuade that these people are Beaux Arts graduates, the dialogue between the two about ‘fine’ versus ‘ugly’ arts is barely credible, and the camera does well to show little of Emma’s putative artworks, even the sketch of Adèle (which is, she says, both like and not like her).
A film that has a significant element of the art world really ought to know its material better – unless, again, this is a sort of pastiche, maybe Adèle having a nightmare about throwing a party for Emma, and then feeling quite out of place, alienated**. Blue is the Warmest Colour suggests a topsy-turvy distance on and from the world, but one can only speculate so long on what is sloppy, what intentional…
End-notes
* Interestingly, Seydoux is 28 (born 1 July 1985), Exarchopoulos 20 (born 22 November 1993).
** At least three times, we are shown the triangle of Adèle's mouth open as her head lies on the pillow, which seemed to be acknowledging that those in their teens sometimes need more sleep (Adèle tells Emma that she eats everything, except shellfish (a dislike that she conquers), and a lot), but could be suggesting that what seems to be happening is but in dream (what else is cinema ?).
The Marivaux novel, from what can be quickly judged of it, does as the film's subtitle suggests that it should, i.e. to take the central character's (inner) point of view. Forty-eight hours after the screening, thinking about what we see of Adèle's life leads to the possibility that there is some element of Belle de Jour (1967) here, and that what may appear to be straight, linear narration is actually more of a dreamscape, a projection into a future that is yet to be...
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
