Blue Is The Warmest Color

Director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Color won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and co-stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos shared the prize for Best Actress.

If you’ve heard anything about this film, it’s probably that it’s very long (3hrs and 7 min.) and/or that it has a lengthy sex scene (7 min.).  Yes and yes.

But, let’s start at the beginning.  Director Kechiche is a master of the close-up shot.  The character Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is B+ attractive at best, but Kechiche and Cinematographer Sofian El Fani seduce us with her face to the point where, depending on your personality, you become her mother/father, sister/brother, boyfriend/girlfriend or just protector. (If none of these, get help.)  

Adèle, at the beginning, is 17 and wants to find her sexual identity and you want her to succeed and be recognized and fulfilled.  So, at the film’s midpoint, when she and Emma (Léa Seydoux) make love, it may be hot, but it's not salacious.

Over the next 6 or 7 years, Adèle goes through her transformation into womanhood and it’s a joy to witness.

Without in any way denigrating Léa Seydoux’s performance, I feel it a shame that Adèle Exarchopoulos had to share the Best Actress award.  She was, by far, the driving force of this excellent film and deserved this award on a solo basis.

 

I give Blue Is The Warmest Color a 4+ out of 5.