Blue is the Warmest Color

I have mixed emotions about Blue is the Warmest Color. On the one hand, it is a universal and realistic story about human connection, loneliness and relationships. It’s anchored by incredible performances from its lead actresses who make you care about their rather ordinary lives and stay interested over the film’s three hour run time. On the other hand, the director brings a little too much sleazy, heterosexual male-ness to the proceedings.

Blue is the Warmest Color is about Adele, who starts the movie as an adrift teenager. Adele becomes fascinated with a blue-haired girl, Emma with whom she eventually begins a relationship. Over the years though, Adele and Emma’s relationship becomes less of the passionate fairy tale it had started out as. They drift apart as a couple and eventually break up. Lost after her relationship with Emma ends, Adele struggles to move on.

What I really like about this film is how universal these two characters’ relationship feels while not losing any of its intimacy. Through the film’s run time, we see infatuation, the idyllic “honeymoon phase”, domesticity, the boredom and drifting that comes with long relationships and finally, two different takes on the end of a relationship. While this film is about a homosexual female relationship, it would be diminishing to call this a “lesbian movie”. Blue is the Warmest Color is about a relationship. One that happens to be homosexual, yes, but that’s far from its defining factor. Any person of any sexuality could probably view this film and relate to these characters.

The performances of Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are what really make Blue is the Warmest Color. At Cannes film festival, they were awarded the Palm d’Or alongside the film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche . This was a first for the ceremony and they really deserved it. Without these actresses, who are exceptionally strong individually and have incredible chemistry together, this movie would have been a complete mess. These actresses really made these characters three-dimensional and were fearless and caring with their portrayals. Their talent combined with the realism of the script occasionally made me forget I was watching actresses in a film instead of real people.

And then, there are the sex scenes.

There was a controversy and debate about Blue is the Warmest Color’s excessive use of lesbian sex scenes. The question was asked whether it’s “art” or exploitation which is a dumb debate because it’s obviously exploitation. Just because it’s in a good movie and shot well doesn’t make these scenes not exploitative. I like a well-shot lesbian sex as much as the next pretentious WLW but nothing can justify these sex scenes.

Sex in a film that isn’t just straight up softcore porn should add something to the narrative. It should tell you something about the characters or the relationship. I’m of the opinion that all of this can usually be done in about a 30 second scene. In this case, all we needed to really grasp from these scenes was that Adele and Emma have a passionate sexual relationship with one another. This is something that I understood within the first minute of any of the given sex scenes. But then they just kept going. I’ve watched a lot of softcore porn and one or two of the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color are longer than the sex scenes in such movies. When your film has longer sex scenes than a film that’s supposed to be about sex, cut it down.

It’s never more obvious that this movie was shot by a straight guy than during these scenes. It feels like for most of this movie, director Abdellatif Kechiche was making an art film but his boner just wouldn’t let him cut down all the footage of lesbian sex he’d shot so he just left it in. It feels very pornographic watching them and the actresses admitted they were uncomfortable filming them. Additionally, there is of course also the fact that being a straight guy, Kechiche isn’t super good on the specifics of lesbians sex. At least one of the positions Adele and Emma get themselves in and seem to enjoy is… not super effective. The shooting of these scenes along with the length of them just felt so straight guy-y. These sex scenes really taint the whole movie. It places the undeniable stamp of straight man across this whole film.

I’m not saying straight guys can’t direct lesbian films, I’m just saying that based on the images the director chooses to put onscreen, it shouldn’t be blatantly obvious to a viewer that the director is indeed, a straight guy. So do I let ten minutes of creepy, straight male indulgence ruin the rest of this three-hour film and all its positives? Not entirely. However, I’d feel a lot less conflicted about this undoubtedly very good film if those damn sex scenes had simply been cut down a bit.

Overall rating: 8.6/10

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