11/12/2022 0 Comments Blue is the warmest colour cast![]() ![]() Its protagonist, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is explored through some exquisitely tiny acting and strictly focused directing by Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous films I have not seen, and so I cannot say if these very close stories of the way that people behave are characteristic of him, or not. The fact is, BITWC is a depiction of adolescent and young adult psychology, primarily as it focuses on romantic relationships, of unyielding intimacy and comprehensive scope. ![]() It's not at all, but it is awfully fucking good, and now I'm done saying bad things about the movie from here on out. And I say all of this in the hopes of augmenting your expectations better than mine were augmented, for I had some timorous hope based on the hype that this might end up being one of the great films of the modern day. ![]() That's a whole lot of words to say, basically, that BITWC has flaws, and those flaws aren't tiny, and it feels like one of those Palmes that was given out for reasons somewhat larger than the movie itself. It sets up, much more clearly, what the film is actually about - since, unlike you've probably been led to believe, this isn't actually three hours of lesbians fucking, but a bildungsroman about a lesbian woman who, during her life, has sex - while also being well-grounded, symbolically, in the film's screenplay. There's a third thing, one that isn't a talking point like the first two, probably because it's kind of petty and dumb on part to even bring it up: for all that Blue Is the Warmest Color is a handsome title, mysterious and poetic and well-grounded in the film's visual schema, the French title, La vie d'Adèle (The Life of Adèle), is better. I can think of one plausible justification for this, which I'm going to hold on to for later. Which gets back to the three-hour running time, because if there's one outrageously obvious place to start backing off on that, it's one of the real-time sex scenes that, by expanding to ten minutes instead of just two or three, only really informs us that Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are good sports, without actually communicating anything about how sex is experienced by humans that wasn't already clear. What I am is a seasoned film-watcher, and in that capacity, I can say this about the sex scenes: there are too many of them, and at least two of them are too long. I am not now and have never been a lesbian, so I really shouldn't pretend like I have a meaningful opinion on whether the sex scenes staged by a straight male director and two straight female actors are meaningfully true to the lesbian experience, but I'll say that the complaints by Julie Maroh, author of the source material, that it's very male gazey seem pretty much spot on, and anyway when a lesbian author looks at the adaptation of her lesbian lovers and tells the world, "that's not how we do it", I'm inclined to at least give her the benefit of the doubt. The explicit, barely-simulated lesbian sex. Maybe I'm wrong about that, for certainly the grand scale of time the film covers justifies that kind of epic treatment, but there are a lot of small moments that are… fine, but the difference between a movie that needs to be three hours long and a movie that needn't aren't a plethora of "fine" moments. More than most Palme d'Or winners, I mean.įirst, the running time: it's a "lifespan of a romantic relationship" drama that is great at three hours, and would probably be just as great and in the same ways if it was, say, two hours and a half. The Palme d'Or winner for 2013, Blue Is the Warmest Color, comes with some serious baggage attached. World premiere: 23 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival ![]()
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