Blue Is The Warmest Colour 123
Melissa Hassel
Several folks questioned the balance of the timeline and the narrative gaps. We wondered if the book had originally been serialized. We also wondered if the unbalance might be a sign of an inexperienced writer.
In the end, some folks liked the pages without images quite a bit. Andrea thought it was a good message for young readers. And even some who did not like the book as much still thought it was worth considering if it is a work of art, if it is compelling, and if alters some ways we might tell stories about gay, lesbian, and queer lives.
The comments on blue is the warmest color leave out the trope of older lesbian seducing younger girl common in homophobic films historically employed here too w the added traditional sexist twist of older artist using a younger woman as a muse/ Pygmalion type character Both used in this film. Very problematic. Probably only got play as a film because of the graphic lesbian seX that het men love too unfortunately and fortunately.
Blue is the Warmest Colour is not just a coming-of-age story, it is also a passionate love story between Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Lea Seydoux). There are two themes that the audience is introduced to fairly early in the film; those of love at first sight and tragedy. And these echo in the film as if the characters are fated to fall into these traps. It is about the beginning, middle and end of a very passionate love affair.
Now, for the main problem I had with the film and that was with the sex scenes. To say that they were explicit would be a massive understatement. They were explicit and then some. And after reading the book, they seem even more excessive. There are sex scenes in the graphic novel but they were about two people making love to each other, in the film, the scene was about lust and merely about the physical act. It gave you no sense that they were in love with each other.
The story is actually a flashback and is told through letters and diaries. Maroh differentiates between the present and past by using colours for the present and almost exclusively using black and white for the past sequences. The artwork is pretty distinct. Blue is one of the colours that she uses in the black and white sequences. It became a very important colour for Clem because she spotted Emma in a sea of people and the first thing she noticed about her was the colour of her hair. That colour became a beacon of salvation for her before she even realised that she needed it. Maroh once again used tones of blue towards the end. It also looks like Maroh used watercolours with lots of greys thrown in instead of the strong and solid black and white you see in a lot of other graphic novels.
What makes the title even more puzzling is that the temperature of the film is either hot or cool and even very cold. I found very few scenes if any that were lukewarm. Like his previous films (more later), Kechiche is a very detached director and deliberately so. His style focuses on long naturalistic takes and immediate close ups largely of the face, but the perspective is detached and definitely non-judgemental whether watching the sheer joy of the women when they fall in love or the blubbering snot soaked face of Adle when she is rejected by Emma and left isolated.
Unlike most reviews and comments that I write the next morning after I have seen the film, I have let this movie simmer in my imagination for several weeks. I have made reference to it in previous reviews, but I have not discussed it. Writing about Venus in Furs, Venus in Fur and The Bacchae seems to have been a necessary preparation for writing about Blue Is the Warmest Colour and a prerequisite for answering the question about the title.
Some moviegoers might remember Kechiche for the film in which he acted as the American Arab hard working and honest immigrant taxi driver in Sorry, Haters, in which his brother is a prisoner in Guantanamo. The film was in the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. Kechiche began his movie career as an actor. This 2005 noire movie, inspired initially by the story of the Canadian, Omar Khadr, has a classic cynical bullying femme fatale (played by Robin Wright Penn) dressed up in a film about culture clashes and post 9/11 anti-Muslim feelings with surprising twists and a more surprising ending, a type of film that Kechiche himself would never make.
With Blue Is the Warmest Colour Kechiche redeems himself and the same close-ups and total immediacy of the moment work in a very opposite direction. The film deservedly won the prize at Cannes not only for the writer and director of the film but for the two co-stars. Instead of a porno movie he made an anti-porno one, a critique of voyeurism not by a moralistic trip, however disguised, about the viewers, which leave them feeling filthy with no one upon whom to displace the dirt. Kechiche accomplished the task by using the naked bodies of two women to put on a show of true erotic passion. We cannot help but be entranced even if some viewers began to get squirrely as the scene went on for seven minutes. The scene was hot. Those who complained that it was sex viewed through the male gaze ignored the reality that the scene was not directed by Kechiche who simply asked the two actors to improvise and act out a feeling of erotic passion for one another. So any disgust and embarrassment some lesbians and others may have felt about the film arose from their own inhibitions and repressions. They were not free or just if they expressed a desire to displace their disgust onto the director.
Blue is the warmest colour because it is about soft porn and this film is about heat and cold, about the extremes of passion and despair, about intimate togetherness and extreme loneliness. It is an authentic love story for it tells how eros overcomes divisions only to see pre-existing divisions acted out in other ways to breed new splits and separations. The title of the film is ironic and tells us what the movie is not about.
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