Relationships are untidy; filled with heightened emotions, illusory expectations, heated passions and loneliness. However, the shyness and coy guarded glances throughout Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” are filled with offbeat timing and thieving peeks.
Tunisian filmmaker Kechiche’s (“Black Venus”) eye focuses on skin, lips, eyes, legs, hair and torsos. The human body never seemed so filled with such a palpable amount of sexual longing.
Adèle (Adele Exarchopoulos, “Pieces of Me”) is a girl trudging through high school, when she glances at Emma (Lea Seydoux, “A Royal Affair”) along the street. Adèle dreams about Emma and when they finally meet at a bar, they begin to have a friendly rapport. And soon enough, the relationship slowly escalates into more.
At the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg and a panel of noted filmmakers, unanimously gave “Blue is the Warmest Color” the Palme d’ Or, the highest award at the festival, to both director Kechiche and stars Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos.
The controversy around why the film has gained so much chatter is the intensely graphic sexual nature of some scenes, which are very graphic. But they retain the charged pitch in “Blue is he Warmest Color,” and the intent, meant as the perilous climax of the relationship, is not misled. Never has the act of fornication seemed so filled with such violent outbursts. Even “Last Tango in Paris” presented a tamer vision in its sexual scenes.
Kechine’s literary sensibility is palpable as “Blue is the Warmest Color” begins with a none too brief mention of Marivaux’s novel “The Life of Marianne,” where love and the eventual lack thereof seems to eviscerate upon itself, leading to the emptiness when a relationship deteriorates.
We want to see Adèle crawl out out the pitiful depths that she gets ensnared in. The absurd fevered emotional depths where Emma leads Adèle never liberate her from love; it simply binds tighter. Relationships can be bliss, but the fatalistic gravity that pulls them hurtling down can damage far more beyond our comprehension.
