Blue Is the Warmest Color

Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 et 2) 2013 France (180 minutes) directed and co-written by Abdellatif Kechiche; adapted from Julie Maroh’s comic book Le Bleu est une couleur chaude.

The theme of Blue Is the Warmest Color is appetite. The film is not about ‘coming of age’, or girlsex, or lesbians, or anything else we have seen in reviews. It is about appetite, feeding. And not just ‘feeding’, but stuffing one’s face: mouths are shot as though independent characters.

Critics pro and con have focused on the provocatively long and frankly pornographic scenes featuring rose-milk moist young female bodies co-luxuriating, sucking, frigging and spanking. These make for a tableau vivant but, like the magician’s white glove, are a sleight of hand that distract the eye from a passion to feed.

This film of overlong scenes begins with a father and daughter gorging themselves on spaghetti in front of a television. This is not upscale ‘pasta’ nor Italian-American mobsters slicing garlic with a razor to sleep with the squid or octopus in a handmade 'gravy'. The camera watches their mouths slurp forks-full of greasy spaghetti slathered with canned tomato sauce down to the last sucked-in strand. The daughter is Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the story’s protagonist.

These eating scenes are really sex scenes. There is not the least suggestion that the unnamed father (Aurélien Recoing) ever had sex with his daughter, much less considered it. What they share is a deep, insatiable sensual appetite in the pits of their stomachs, a craving to feed. The unnamed mother (Catherine Salée) seems not to share this appetite. She recognizes it, perhaps reflexively: she pours herself more wine. It is notable also that Adèle later makes her father’s spaghetti recipe for her lover’s reception. The feeding mouths make this film subversive in the way Luis Buñuel’s films were subversive, though perhaps unintentionally.  

Eating meets sex when Adèle and her soon-to-be lover Emma (Léa Seydoux) picnic in a park. Adèle says: ‘I eat everything. I could eat nonstop all day. It’s scary, even when I’m full.’ Everything that is, but shellfish. Emma likes oysters. Adèle says the texture ‘grosses her out’. ‘That’s the best part,’ says Emma. They remind Adèle of ‘big snot balls’. ‘They remind me of something else,’ Emma says smiling. 

 

The lesbian theme assaults viewers like Buñuel’s terrorists bursting into a dining room and machine-gunning prosperous bourgeois dinner guests. The two main characters have lots of sex. But Adèle’s desire to ‘eat nonstop’, her longing to feed, is the point. ‘Le charme discret’ is the fat greedy hand reaching from under the table in the aftermath of the fusillade to grab one more chicken leg from an abandoned plate.

 

In any case, this is a fictional story about a young woman, not a documentary about lesbians or the lesbian community. Actually, a shorter, more impressionistic film would have worked better than this extended-scene epic. We found this story less convincing with more than one viewing.

The narrative is straightforward. Adèle is a high school student who lives in a Paris suburb with her working class parents. The sexual curiosity and inexperience of catty teenage female classmates produces incessant crude chatter and bluster about sex; Adèle clearly has options. She also is friends with Valentin (Sandor Funtek), an openly gay classmate better grounded than the other kids. 

Adèle’s classmates goad her into dating Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte). The teenage couple fumble around sexually: the boy knows what he wants and he gets it; Adèle feels what she needs but gets barely a taste of what her appetite craves. She dumps him. This is the end of Thomas’s world, for a day or two; Adèle embarks deeper into uncharted waters.

On her way to a date with Thomas, Adèle is haunted by a momentary glance she exchanges with a young woman with blue hair. ‘Love at first sight’ is among the topics discussed in her French literature class. Adèle later lets this woman find her in a lesbian bar where Adèle had guessed that she might see her. A relationship blooms between the inexperienced but hungry Adèle and Emma, a lesbian five or six years older. 

 

Emma, a fourth year painting student at the École des Beaux Arts, has been living two years with Lise (Mona Walravens). With Emma, Adèle at first experiences the explosion of the sensual pleasure she has hungered for in sex. They both do. We see a great deal more of this than is necessary to sustain the narrative. Emma leaves Lise and brings Adèle to her home. The second part of the film shows the two women living together pursuing separate careers: Adèle is a primary school teacher, Emma a painter.

But the younger, working class Adèle does not fit in with Emma’s lesbian friends; she is a lovely model, but unsophisticated to Emma’s art friends. Adèle’s sole friend and passion is Emma. She begins to feel less ‘loved’: her appetite is for Emma, not for playing the conventional roles of an artist’s model and wife, nor being a lesbian partner. Adèle feels isolated in a milieu that does not take her seriously or accept her—nor she it. Her point of view tells us that she is not a lesbian socially or culturally; likelier yet, she is not a lesbian at all.  

And for all Emma’s arty posing, she has a conventional heart. The blue rinses out of her hair; she has sown her wild oats and wants to settle down; she draws away from Adèle. Emma finds a pretext to break up, and returns to her domestic relationship with Lise who is raising small children.   

 

In the end, a bereft Adèle walks out of their lives and then out of the final shot in the warmest color, with that deep, insatiable sensual longing in the pit of her stomach.

Atmosphere & Attitude

Bob le Flambeur 1956 France; Rialto Pictures (102 minutes) written, directed and produced by Jean-Pierre Melville.
                The 1956 French heist movie Bob le Flambeur, a mood piece made by a French director who loved American gangster films, captures what even then was likely a Parisian nostalgia for the immediate postwar years.
                Bob le Flambeur occupies the same dreamspace as classics like Casablanca, Pépé le Moko and To Have and Have Not. Few people could inhabit such romantic improbabilities; but these stories’ nostalgia-scented magic has seduced generations of moviegoers into believing they might.

Told in black-and-white, these stories roam the city streets at night peering in the shadows, the neon signs and streetlights their silent witnesses. Writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob opens ‘in those moments between night and day, by the dawn’s early light’; the final curtain comes down at roughly the same hour. Most of the gambling happens afterhours in bars, clubs and restaurants with the chairs on the tables.

Yet for all its dark tones this picture is leavened with a wry nonchalance which would evoke a nostalgia for a time when there was honor among thieves. Melville’s characters are not as garrulous as Quentin Tarentino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’, but similarly quip and banter beyond the confines of the narrative.

‘For anyone who lived in the postwar period, nothing can compare to those days,’ said Daniel Cauchy, one of the film’s co-stars, interviewed in 2002. Cauchy said that he was living on Place Pigalle, where much of the story transpires, during the two years that Melville shot the film. In Cauchy’s view, in the period that followed five years of war and the German occupation of Paris, ‘things in the city were easier, people were light-hearted, and those who had money paid for those who did not’.

In the opening sequence, a narrator—Melville—tells us that Montmartre, the center of the action, is both heaven, with a shot of the Sacré-Cœur basilica which crowns the hill, and hell, showing a tram slowly descending to the bottom and then signage on Place Pigalle, best known for its ‘boldest-nudes-in-the-world’ girlie shows and sex workers.

The heist, conceived after the story is underway, is the straightforward stick-up of a seaside gambling casino in Deauville, Normandy. After accounting for the technical details, the outcome rides on the elements of timing, surprise—and Lady Luck. 

The film’s main characters are: Robert ‘Bob le Flambeur’ Montagné (Roger Duchesne), a charismatic reformed career thief with a gambling problem, his associate Roger (André Garet), his protégé Paulo (Cauchy) and Yvonne (Simone Paris), the proprietress of the Pile ou Face (Heads or Tails) Bar, Bob’s hangout; Lieutenant Ledru (Guy Decomble), a sympathetic police commissioner; young hoods, pimps and prostitutes of Paris’s Quartier Pigalle on the make; and Anne (Isabelle Corey), a teenager ambitious to become a part of this scene.

More than just a gambler, a ‘flambeur’ is a person in thrall to his passion for gambling—a gambling addict.

Bob, a compulsive gambler, is known by his associates ‘to win big, but lose bigger’. We see him drag the loyal Roger to the track with hot tip on a harness race, and then see a smiling Bob collect his winnings at the window. Yet just as quickly he is cleaned out at the card table. 

And he lives with style. Everyone in Quartier Pigalle (and at police headquarters at 36, Quai des Orfèvres) knows and respects ‘Monsieur Bob’. He has a duplex apartment on Avenue Junot with a picture window centered on the Sacré-Cœur; he has paintings, art objects and old books. He has a foreign slot machine in a closet and drives a new American convertible. But luck is not a lady with Bob.

Nor is Anne, the teenager he tries to prevent ‘sidewalk Romeos’ from making a ‘pavement princess’, though she wants dearly to be. Bob first notices the tall, well-built woman early one morning on Place Pigalle as she buys chips and then climbs on a motorcycle behind an American sailor. He then meets her in the Pile ou Face after chasing off Marc (Gérard Buhr), a sidewalk Romeo.

The story is that Melville first spotted the same ‘toute jeune fille trés avancée pour son âge’ on the street and picked her up in his car as Bob does in the movie. It turned out that Corey was a model not yet 16 years old. This pretty teenager is not a conventional Hollywood starlet, and had no screen-acting experience, but her sexuality is striking—equally for a film director, a collector of precious objects, a Pigalle wolf, and a moviegoer—and makes her a key piece in this nostalgic dreamspace.

Cauchy said in his 2002 interview that mobsters were drawn to actors and directors, not because they were star-struck, but because the roles the actors played corresponded to the mobsters’ everyday lives. This had the effect of blurring fiction and reality, he said. Cauchy added that in the 1950s, he and other movie people socialized, gambled and went to the track with mobsters, and that these elements worked their way into movies.

Cauchy also noted that Melville may have been the first film director to show people shot falling backward rather than forward.

He said that he had ‘died’ in several gangster movies clutching his stomach and falling forward as he had seen actors like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart do in American movies. But Melville wanted him just once to ‘throw himself backward’—and used that shot. ‘I think he heard about this from someone who was shot during the war,’ Cauchy said. 

When Bob complains to Ledru that ‘the mob is not what it used to be’, Cauchy said, he is referring to how the war changed the Paris underworld. During the war, half the professional criminals had collaborated with the Germans as associates of the Bonny-Lafont Gang and the French Gestapo; the other half, including the Guerini brothers [the Corsican mob] fought for the Resistance, he said.

French law enforcement under the Nazis blurred the differences between cops and robbers. The Germans retained French locals with questionable backgrounds to enforce the law, and insiders made a killing on the black market though many did not survive the peace. After the war, the Corsicans, which controlled heroin trafficking through Marseilles, constituted what became known in the 1950s and 1960s as the French Connection.

At the casino’s chemin de fer table on the night of the heist, Bob wins big as never before. But Lt. Ledru has been tipped off. Two pairs of low-slung black Traction Citroëns, those of the gang and those of the police, converge on the casino entrance at the appointed hour at daybreak.

Maybe for once Bob will not lose bigger than he wins.

Among several remakes and homages to this film are Oceans 11 (1960 and 2001), Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1996 Hard Eight, and Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, made in 2003 with Nick Nolte as Bob Montagnet. Jordan’s film, set in Nice, updated the original characters, adopted much of the dialogue and added an intriguing plot wrinkle.

In addition to a high definition digital transfer of the original print, the Criterion Collection DVD released in 2003 includes the above-quoted 2002 interview with Cauchy, who also starred in Melville’s Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre (1953) and Jacques Becker’s 1954 Touchez pas au Grisbi, among other films.