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.