Led by this internal dissent, the film's critical tide may be slowing, if not turning. Become a member to write your own review. Kechiche sketches this out by having Emma bring Adèle around for dinner with her mum and stepdad. Movie reviews for Blue Is The Warmest Color. Then there's the ostensible "male gaze" issue. The most explicit scene lasts nearly 7 minutes. As it happens, that's not the thing that starts to drive the lovers apart. Indeed, it would be reductive to slap an exclusive gay-interest label on “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a bildungsroman and first-love story whose deep and … What a passionate film it is. As the two lovers go, inevitably, out of the state of white-hot attraction and voraciousness and into a domesticity that presents the typical, and typically ugly, problems that an acolyte/ingénue arrangement presents, Adèle seems to grow up before the viewer's eyes in a way that makes Emma's self-possessed confidence look kind of complacent. Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. While this epic didn’t blow me away as Weekend did, it certainly was a fascinating, intelligent work that justifies its 3-hour length on an intellectual level, even if not an emotional one. Blue Is the Warmest Colour should, by all rights, be a bit of a struggle. It is fictional. The acting, especially of the lead actress who we follow throughout these three hours, is astonishing! Review: The Croods: A New Age Is a Step Up that Still Leaves You Wanting More. This drama was never supposed to celebrate the equality of their romantic good faith. As for the much discussed sex scene, I predicted earlier this year that some sophisticates would claim to find it "boring". He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Yet the point is surely that there is no guarantee that either Adèle or Emma will ever find anything as good ever again. Maymay A Super Reviewer Blue is the warmest color is a super strong drama about love and passion. (There's a scene in the movie where Emma and Adèle admire the perfect female posteriors in marble at a museum that suggests Kechiche's potential apologia: that everyone should be able to appreciate a beautiful derriere.). Parents need to know that Blue Is the Warmest Color is a French drama with English subtitles that chronicles a high school girl as she matures emotionally and sexually over about 10 years. As a heterosexual male myself I am of, well, several minds about this. Watching Blue is the Warmest Color provides viewers with that rarest of motion picture opportunities: the ability to lose oneself in the life of another for three hours and to emerge having felt something. Adèle imagines that the mysterious, blue-haired girl she encountered. It was released too late in French theaters to be eligible for a 2014 foreign-language Oscar. Its original French title is perhaps a better guide: La Vie d'Adèle Chapitres 1 et 2. Abdellatif Kechiche's epic film evokes love in its purest and most passionate form – intense, cataclysmic and unforgettable. Watched it in three parts spread over several days. ... BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR. So much so that one isn't much bothered by the material that Kechiche elides in his long film. Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or winning drama about Adèle and the woman she meets next, brims with honesty and affection for its subject. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, this finely detailed, intimate epic sensitively renders the erotic abandon of youth. For his latest film, Abdellatif Kechiche returns to themes of love and maturation with Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adele, Chapters 1&2), based on the graphic novel by Julie Maroh. When Emma meets Adèle's conservative folks, however, the food is humbler – spag bol – and Emma has to pretend to have a boyfriend. Review: Before Turning Histrionic, Uncle Frank Is a Tender Look at Outsider Kinship. And once the hurting starts, the performances grow more wondrous and sad. Blue Is the Warmest Color is an alright work that has, at its center, an interesting examination of a common story. The second charge, that it is exploitative or inauthentic, is also naive. Director Abdellatif Kechiche gets amazing performances out of two young actresses and gives the viewer a lot to think about. The notion that they can each go on to find a better or richer experience is illusory. Big success in the film business often means opening a can of worms along with the champagne. MRQE Metric: See what the critics had to say and watch the trailer. It was powerful and gripping in its honesty and fearlessness. At TIFF 2013, Matt reviews Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color starring Adele Exarchopoulos. And once Adèle really finds Emma (Léa Seydoux), in a lesbian bar, it's not long before the student and the soon-to-be artiste begin having intense, soul-searching conversations on a soon-to-be-iconic (for Adele) park bench. Servant Returns to Clean Up the Chaos of Season One, START TV Continues My Start Story Campaign Amidst Pandemic. A handsome male classmate falls for her, but an unsettling erotic reverie upsets the romance before it begins. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a young schoolteacher who is feeling her way through early adulthood and her first … A handsome male classmate falls for her, but an … Though Blue is the Warmest Color, winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, contains graphic depictions of sex, it is not a voyeuristic exercise but a complex, deeply intense film that elevates one young woman's personal struggle into a drama of universal relevance. Blue is the Warmest Color centers on a 15-year-old girl named Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who is climbing to adulthood and dreams of experiencing her first love. Blue Is the Warmest Color stars the remarkable newcomer Adèle Excharpoulos as a high schooler who, much to her own surprise, plunges into a thrilling relationship with a female twentysomething art student, played by Léa Seydoux. And when Emma's art career takes off, Kechiche shows how she is starting inexorably to outgrow Adèle, and yet it is Adèle who develops a kind of emotional maturity that Emma, the increasingly smug careerist, can't match. The movie's transportive quality lies almost entirely with its lead actresses. Blue Is the Warmest Color is so thoughtful on love, LGBT issues, and works as both a coming of age graphic novel and a romance novel. They aren't hours that fly by, either, nor are they meant to; Kechiche, who as it happens is here adapting a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, intends for his viewers to luxuriate and/or empathize in and on particular details. The explicit sex certainly grabs the attention, but Blue Is the Warmest Color offers the adult viewer a great deal more to ponder. First loves are always the same and always different. And it isn't as if Kechiche is Max Hardcore, for heaven's sake. Teens, though, are unlikely to have the patience to sit through three hours of extended literature- and philosophy-class discussions or the equally … He frequently frames Exarchopoulos in particular so as to accentuate the post-adolescent ripeness of her beauty. FILM REVIEW 'Blue is the Warmest Color' 3 ½ stars (out of 4) Cast: Adele Exarchopoulos, Lea Seydoux, Sandor Funtek, Salim Kechiouche. Blue Is the Warmest Color was released in 2013 and has generally received very positive reviews. There is a vivid party scene at the middle of Abdellatif Kechiche’s sprawling Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka, in France, La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2) that encapsulates some of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Blue is the Warmest Color is unique in its openness and honesty about same-sex relationships although we never really experience the outsider status in society and … At the outset, Exarchopoulos's Adèle is a shy, smart high-schooler who finds that she is lonely and tentative in her social life. They are committed to their roles to a degree that could be called exuberant. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. Run time: 179 minutes. But I think that the impact of the movie increases with a second viewing, and my own objections about the lovers' ferocious "confrontation" scene have been answered. Feeling no spark with him, or any other guys, she fixates on a blue-haired older girl she sees on the streets of her provincial French town. Matt reviews Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color starring Adèle Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. Emma is always the senior, dominant partner: better educated, more worldly and higher up the social scale. The love story “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was written, produced and directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here. The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "Blue is the Warmest Color." As Kechiche shows, that is a bad sign. Online reviewers have written 995 reviews, giving Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) an average rating of 79%. The sequence certainly strikes me as uncompromising and less exploitative than any smug softcore romcom or mainstream thriller in which women's implied sexual availability is casually served up as part of the entertainment, although I will concede one tiny moment of misjudgment: when Emma is painting a nude of Adèle (unfortunately like Leo and Kate in Titanic) and the camera travels up her naked body. (There are echoes here, oddly enough, of Claude Chabrol's little-seen 1990 adaptation of Henry Miller's "Quiet Days In Clichy," starring Andrew McCarthy.). This long romance is affecting in spite of Abdellatif Kechiche’s direction, not because of it, and that’s never more apparent than during its much-discussed explicit sex scene. I am loath to give away the plot details that some say constitute spoilers, but on the other hand, as I said up front, this is a story of first love, and all stories of first love wind up somehow as stories of first love betrayed. ... Clementine is 15 in 1994 when she sees a beautiful young woman with blue hair crossing the plaza. As for Kechiche, his feelings about that last-minute requirement to share the Palme with his two actors can only be guessed at – and the same goes for their feelings about his feelings. [ This is a re-post of my review … The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "Blue is the Warmest Color." The cockeyed open-heartedness of Kechiche's conception yields a girl-meets-girl-and-so-on story of three hours. ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ by Julie Maroh. The two women meet when Adéle is about to finish high school, and Emma has started college. By Kristin M. Jones in the November-December 2013 Issue. It’s a French romance-drama weighing in at almost three hours and featuring more dialogue than you could shake a … The romantic spark between them is a lightning bolt. Author: Paige Cohen October 24, 2013. That night, the woman figures in an erotic dream, and her world is rocked. A good-looking boy who likes her is rewarded with a brief relationship, but he is merely John the Baptist to the imminent Christ: Emma, played by Séydoux, a twentysomething art student. Director: Abdellatif Kechiche. Adèle, played by Exarchopoulos, is the sympathetic centre of the story, a schoolgirl at the beginning and a teacher by the end: the two chapters of innocence and experience. Its multi-chambered heart is certainly in one or two of the right places, let's say. It is no more authentic or inauthentic than any sex scene, or washing-up scene, or checking-in-at-the-airport scene. Léa Seydoux (l.) is an art school grad student and Adèle Exarchopoulos is a confused 15-year-old when they meet in "Blue Is the Warmest Color." In detailing the relationship between blue-collar Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), 15, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), an older, sophisticated art student, Blue Is the Warmest Color … But suggestions that he got a little carried away here are not totally nuts. Blue Is the Warmest Color 2013 ★★★★½ Rewatched Nov 06 , 2016 LauraBirnbaum’s review published on Letterboxd: Film. Julie Maroh, who wrote the original graphic novel, dismissed Kechiche's adaptation as a straight person's fantasy of gay love. In detailing the relationship between blue-collar Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), 15, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), an older, sophisticated art student, Blue Is the Warmest Color … Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak. The audacity of director Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is The Warmest Color" lies not so much in the fact that it tells the story of a same-sex first love than in that it tells this story in what some would consider epic detail. Blue Is the Warmest Color review. The cockeyed open-heartedness of Kechiche's conception yields a girl-meets-girl-and-so-on story of three hours. Having a healthy "love" for the female form, one may sensibly argue, is not the same thing as leering at it. The Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival went to the epic and erotic love story Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Yes, Kechiche is a male depicting lesbian love; and yes, he's a heterosexual male depicting lesbian love enacted between two very attractive actresses. Blue is the Warmest Color triumphantly revealed love in the extremes, both in its beauty and in its monstrosity. The breakout 2013 film Blue is the Warmest Color has been lauded as one of the most passionate, devastating love stories in recent memory. BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is an abhorrent French drama about a torrid lesbian affair between a young artist and a young teacher. The are multiple explicit love scenes between two women with graphic nudity. As Adéle turns 17 or 18 (the movie isn’t quite clear), the two young women begin a torrid lesbian affair. Review: Blue Is the Warmest Color By Kristin M. Jones in the November-December 2013 Issue There is a vivid party scene at the middle of Abdellatif Kechiche’s sprawling Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka, in France, La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2 ) that encapsulates some of … Blue Is the Warmest Colour is the only mainstream film so far to treat a lesbian affair on equal terms with a heterosexual one. Review: Blue Is the Warmest Color. Their love is cooling. Blue is the Color of My True Love’s Hair: Kechiche Takes Us Deep Sea, Baby. Neither gives off the slightest hint of working to achieve or inhabit an emotional effect. It has very explicit sex with full nudity and graphic depictions of sex acts, mostly between two women, but one with a man also briefly shows an erect penis. Blue is the Warmest Color is a masterpiece of human warmth, empathy and generosity, because in a mere three hours, it gives you a whole new life to have lived. To paraphrase Woody Allen, if it doesn't make the rest of your life look like a massive letdown then you're not doing it right. “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which has now opened in the United States, is a sexual coming-of-age story about a French provincial voluptuary, Adèle (Ms. Exarchopoulos).