Director – Abdellatif Kechiche – 2013 – France – Cert. 18 – 180m
UK release date 22/11/2013;
Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.
A loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, this is one of the most touching films about romantic love (and physical passion) ever. Be warned, it contains some pretty explicit, real rather than simulated, sex scenes (there’s good reason for the 18 certificate) but these appear in a wider, character-driven context.
Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her mainly girl peer group at school spend much time discussing boys. She sleeps with but feels no real connection to a boy who’s a “sure thing”. While this romance is going nowhere, she exchanges glances with an unknown blue-haired girl on the arm of another woman on the street and is completely smitten. Seeing her emotional turmoil, she’s dragged off for a drink by her confidant, a boy she’s unaware is gay until they’re together in a gay bar, from which she makes her excuses and somehow winds up alone in an all-girl bar where Emma (Léa Seydoux), the girl with blue hair, chats her up. From there, to the confusion of her straight peers, a relationship slowly blossoms into full-blown passion.
But there are tensions: their relationship is openly discussed with Emma’s well off, artistically inclined parents who serve seafood and talk about l’amour, but it’s in the closet with Adèle’s lower class parents who dish up spag bog and thank Emma for helping Adèle with her philosophy classwork.
Several years later, they’re living together. Emma is a rising painter on the art gallery circuit, while muse and model Adèle is a kindergarten teacher who hasn’t yet come out to her work colleagues. Then Emma starts avoiding sex and, at a party for many of her art world friends, ignores Adèle in favour of the pregnant Lise (Mona Walravens)…
Weighing in at three hours, this never outstays its welcome. There’s an obvious precedent in 1939’s even longer Gone With The Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), out this month in a fabulous, big screen, 4K digital restoration. The nearest one got to a sex scene back then was Vivian Leigh in bed the morning after with a big smile on her face. While GWTW has dated remarkably well on the big screen, the more obviously contemporary BITWC confronts the issue of sex full on with explicit, unsimulated scenes. A pornographic intent would employ a whole visual vocabulary of specific details to arouse the viewer. Instead, these scenes are contextualised as part of the wider relationship.
Unlike the watershed Last Tango In Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972), where the male and female leads couple in a wide variety of sexual positions without any real spiritual connection elsewhere, BITWC‘s female-on-female graphic sequences form a necessary part of a couple seeking to establish their life together. Towards the end, the spiritual and emotional devastation for Adèle, separated from but still yearning for the no longer interested Emma, is all the more effective as a result. Brando said of Last Tango’s done for real sex scenes that he never, ever wanted to be put throughthat again. While that might equally be an issue for BITWC’s two leads,the two actresses’ performances throughout – by no means just in the physical scenes – are emotionally raw, honest and out there.
Seasoned director Kechiche knows how to pace a story; like GWTW, BITWC may be long, but it’s not padded out. The film deservedly picked up the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year. The honest representation of human sexuality is a difficult area, here shrouded in unjustifiable but understandable taboo, there subject to the wrong sort of exploitation; this extraordinary film, however, walks the near impossible path between the two and gets it right.
Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.
Trailer: