Whenit was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Abdellatif Kechiche's latest film, Blue is the Warmest Colour, won rapturous reviews, before going on to win the coved Palme D'Or. Based on the French graphic novel, Blue Angel, the film follows a love affair between two young women.Seventeen year old Adele’s life is changed when she meets Emma, a sapphire haired university student, and her path changes from adrift high school student to a woman discovering herself and sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Color. Beautiful and honest, Blue is the Warmest Color is aSeventeen year old Adele’s life is changed when she meets Emma, a sapphire haired university student, and her path changes from adrift high school student to a woman discovering herself and sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Color. Beautiful and honest, Blue is the Warmest Color is a realistic love story. I find it quite hard to say what it is about without it sounding banal. Adele is a confused girl, unfulfilled in her life, trying to figure out what she desires. Then, girl meets girl, girl likes girl, girl falls for girl, and girl’s relationship with girl follows its destined course. In the meantime, girl comes to grips with her desire, sexuality and identity. But it is poignant, sweet, sad, unflinching, The more naive and inexperienced of the two is Adele, played by Adele Exarchopoulos. She does a wonderful job of being both unsure and youthfully headstrong. I enjoyed her character being so blase about pretenses and frivolity in the superficial. She is hilarious to watch eat food, Adele ravenously devours meals as if her appetite for sustenance is insatiable. Emma, played by Lea Seydoux, is the slightly older college student who Adele befriends, at first as a confidante and mild mentor, but soon that friendship evolves. Emma is free-spirited and confident without being pretentious or judgmental and Seydoux’s character warrants Adele’s infatuation. The film is raw, the sex scenes enthralling without being gratuitous and what you get essentially from Blue is the Warmest Color is a coming of age lesbian love story. More reviews of recent releases can be found at our website.… Expand Themale gaze is objectifying, reductive, and dominates our visual culture. So, the antidote must be balancing it out with a new emphasis on the female gaze, right? Wrong. The way the female gaze has been conceptualized still propagates the usual stereotypes about female identity. What was meant to act as a liberation from the male gaze turns out to be a different limiting view of women.
22/05/2013 - Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux smash the barriers of social romanticism in the exceptional feminine "love story" by Abdellatif KechicheAdèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Colour"Touching the very essence of the human being" is the challenge of "cinéma vérité", or cinema revealing the candid truth, always confronted by Abdellatif Kechiche in a career already rich in rewards after only four feature films. But with Blue is the Warmest Color [+see also trailerinterview Abdellatif Kechichefilm profile], in competition at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaker clearly soars to an even higher altitude by getting as close as possible to the hearts and skins of two young women from very different social backgrounds. Weaving a hyper-sexed romantic work of extraordinary breadth without ever departing from his stylistic line giving priority to life and the intensity of the sequences, nor renouncing profound reflection and social analysis, the director offers the almost unknown Adèle Exarchopoulos and rising star Léa Seydoux two enormous roles which they assume with incredible audacity. But beyond these performances nourished by the embraces, laughter and tears of youth, the film asserts itself as an ode to the simplest form of freedom and the most difficult to achieve, that of assuming who we are, without having to justify it. "What's my gender?" For the adolescent, questions about identity are ultra-relevent and Adèle Adèle Exarchopoulos, a school-girl from a working-class family in the suburbs of Lille, is of an age when the appetite for love and sexuality awakens. With a fondness for literature in an environment in which culture is virtually non-existent in conversations among girl-friends and at family dinners lulled by TV, she sooon feels uncomfortable in an adventure with a boy. For her life has changed since she happened to come across a girl with blue hair who unexpectedly invites herself into her erotic dreams. Somewhat lost in her desires and in a more or less unconscious search for this apparition, she is soon to find her and overcomes the aggressiveness of some of the school-girls "You'll never lick my pussy, you dirty dyke" before launching herself into the unknown territory of feminine homosexuality. Emma Léa Seydoux, the girl with blue hair, in her fourth year at the Fine Arts Academy, falls for Adèle's charm, gently keeping her at a distance at first "I'm one of those grown-ups who hang around in gay bars. I think we're rather different" before yielding to the alchemy of torrid bodies. Then begins the life of a couple that will gradually be fractured over the years by their vocations Adèle a teacher, Emma a designer and the gap that separates them in terms of ambitions, original backgrounds, education and their ways of envisaging happiness… While remaining true to the fundamental corpus the discovery of passion between women of the comic strip Le bleu est une couleur chaude on which he based his film, Abdellatif Kechiche evacuates almost all the aspects of lesbian militantism and the tragic dimension from his adaptation, in order to concentrate more fully on the sociological theme so dear to him the social gap and "melting pot" territories body to body, the pleasures of shared eating, demonstrations, parties and dancing, small classes in school etc.. His directing, which has become expert in the art of close-ups and movement delves deeply into the characters and examines the details of their feelings in long captivating sequences. The mastery and powerfulness of the sex scenes in particular go well beyond their pornographic dimension, simply offering portrayals of palpitating nature in its simplest expression. A transmutation also achieved by the transmission of numerous references in ideally rendered scenes of daily life, including The Life of Marianne by Marivaux the tale of a woman advancing towards and against everything, Antigone the "little" heroine one day deciding to say no and Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism. A whole which makes Blue is the Warmest Color a very great film, achieving spontaneous fusion between body and soul. Translated from FrenchThisfilm courageously dives into a young woman's experiences of first love and sexual awakening. Blue Is the Warmest Color stars the remarkable newcomer Adele Excharpoulos as a high schooler who, much to her own surprise, plunges into a thrilling relationship with a female twentysomething art student, played by Lea Seydoux (Midnight in Paris).
So rarely does a film perfectly encapsulate the epic journey of a single relationship. The fevered anticipation of meeting someone interesting; the enveloping ravenous lust that takes over when everything is so exciting and so new; the slow-building love and admiration for another person; the inevitable mistakes that lead to impending despair; and the heartbreaking regret of what could have been. 'Blue is the Warmest Color,' is adapted from Julie March's graphic novel "Blue Angel." In the film, Adele Adele Exarchopoulos is a young, confused French teen. Like many teens she struggles to find an identity within her group of friends. At the beginning she's unsure of herself around her friends. She tries to fit in, sidling up to the fringe of the group, laughing with them, smoking with them, but never really interacting with them. Adele's life is all surface deep up to this point. She's searching for something more, but this is all she's got to work with. Until, one day, she spots a blue-haired beauty on the street. Adele is mesmerized. The girl with blue hair is Emma Lea Seydoux. It's easy to tell that Emma is a lesbian, but up until this point we aren't sure what Adele is. She's attracted immediately to Emma, but it takes her a while to come to grips with her own sexuality. What transpires is a beautiful journey of one girl trying to figure out who she is, and another girl who finds love in all the wrong places. What's so intoxicating about 'Blue is the Warmest Color' is watching Adele grow from a teenager to a woman seamlessly. The movie covers a wide expanse of time – how much we're not really sure – and Adele grows right along with it. With minimal makeup and costume changes, Adele appears to age as the movie presses on toward its lengthy 179 minute runtime. Exarchopoulos shows some astonishing acting skill by making us believe that she's really growing and evolving from a girl to a woman. It's a slow, but deliberate and rewarding process. Much has been made of 'Blue is the Warmest Color's graphic sex scenes. The movie earned an NC-17 rating, and rightly so. The scenes are graphic, but they play a part in the overall story. Here's a girl who has been so reserved for so long, she's finally ready to let loose. Then she finds this mysterious, sexy stranger and everything falls into place. It's a fever dream of skin and passion. Sadly, because of these scenes the movie has been written off by some as "that lesbian movie." In the age of the Internet those scenes, which amount to only a fraction of the film, have garnered the most comment. Are we all not human? Haven't we, at one time or another felt that kind of unbridled passion? Maybe we haven't, but others have. Where some have derided these scenes as pornographic, or over the top, I see two women who have finally found each other and they want to express their love for one another. Sex, seems like a great outlet for that, don't you think? I can't remember the last time I saw such an effective, and engrossing, coming-of-age story. It felt real, and unfiltered. A deep and intimate look at a single tumultuous relationship between two people. The dangers of unchecked desire, and how easy it is to hurt the ones you care about. 'Blue is the Warmest Color' was one of my favorite films from last year. Blu-ray Vital Disc Stats Criterion has released 'Blue is the Warmest Color' on a single 50GB Blu-ray Disc. Housed in Criterion's trademark clear case, this release comes with a spine number of 695, and a foldout. The foldout contains an essay entitled "Feeling Blue" by B. Ruby Rich, editor of Film Quarterly. There's also the standard notes about the cast, the transfer, and production notes.
BlueIs the Warmest Color. Drama. Starring Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. In French with English subtitles. (NC-17. 179 minutes.) Young love is a familiar Watched Mar 09, 2020 GeraldLovesCinema247’s review published on Letterboxd Led by two extremely powerhouse performances, resoundingly astute direction, immaculately stunning cinematography, and most of all, an emotionally-striking screenplay, Blue is the Warmest Colour is powerfully moving cinema at its finest. Wow, what a tour of heavily sensual emotions this film seriously is. This highly acclaimed French romance drama remains one of the best movies made in the last 10 years. It definitely ranks up there as one of most purely well-refined works of art among the LGTBQ genre. From start to finish, Blue is the Warmest Colour is an equally effective coming of age story as it is a film about heartbreak and betrayal. Based off of the graphic novel of the same name, the movie chronicles the life of a French teenager, named Adéle, who meets and falls in love with aspiring female painter, Emma. The first part acts as the birth and growth of their undeniable chemistry, while the second half is dedicated to the decay of their relationship. Through this relationship, Adele finds her personal freedom and liberation from the longing of true love she's been struggling with. Adéle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are undoubtedly amazing together on-screen. Not only do they have great chemistry together, but both of them exchange such raw emotional depth between each other that you really do forget that these are characters on the-screen. They did an outstanding job of portraying this relationship with pure realism and naturalism. As the movie progresses, you can notice all of the subtle details that likely paved the way for their eventual breakup. On top of all of that, the sex scenes in this movie are indescribably charging and filmed with uncompromising tenacity. Blue is the Warmest Colour doesn't convey any false pretenses about its characters or its subject matter. It's a movie that deals with lesbian romance and artistic aspirations in such a profoundly honest way. The cinematography is impressively beautiful to gaze at, especially the close-up shot of Adéle floating on the beach as the water caresses her face. Oh man, I can't recommend Blue is the Warmest Colour enough. It more than earns the praise it has accumulated over the Rating Block or Report Kechiches style is dizzy, obsessive, inspired and relentless, words that also describe Adèle and Emma and the fearless women who embody them. Many more words can — and will — be spent on "Blue Is ANew York Times bestseller The original graphic novel adapted into the film Blue Is the Warmest Color, winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival In this tender, bittersweet, full-color graphic novel, a young woman named Clementine discovers herself and the elusive magic of love when she meets a confident blue-haired girl named Emma: a lesbian love story for the ages that Thelong love scenes between Emma and Adèle have garnered a lot of attention in discussions of Blue Is the Warmest Color. It's true, they're unusually lengthy and explicit for a non-porn film, but they function as character development, not titillation, demonstrating how completely Adèle commits to her love and the freedom and