What people find sexy differs wildly. Me? I've always found a fleeting touch, stolen glance, or first kiss carries a greater charge than the point to which it's all leading. Anticipation is everything. (In films that is. In real life I find... I find it to be none of your business what I find. Move along.) Blue is the Warmest Colour is 90% stolen glances and 10% getting down and dirty. In a film with a running time of three hours, that's an awful lot of down and dirty.
Supposedly the story is about 17-year-old Adèle's affair with the sultry and self-involved art student Emma (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, respectively), but an hour passes before they first talk, let alone touch. The relationship is at the centre of the film, but it's not what it's about. It's about belonging. Adèle is forever trying to find where she fits in. She dates a boy, but that doesn't feel right; she's kissed by a girl in her class, but that leads nowhere; she hangs out with various disparate groups: artists, lesbians and, later on, colleagues (as well as, a little too randomly, and with next to no explanation, a gay best friend who materialises from nowhere), but she rarely feels at ease with any of them. It's during the film's early stretch, when this theme is front and centre, that the story is at its most promising. When Adèle's friends call her out on her distant manner (and her new friend Emma, who they all feel looks decidedly lesbian-y) Adèle has to lie to save face. When Emma first meets Adèle's parents she's also moved to lie, mentioning a non-existent boyfriend, as Adèle's father doesn't seem the understanding type. Abdellatif Kechiche, who directed and co-wrote the film, doesn't spend long on these moments. Moments which are fascinating and dramatic in a way that a lot of what follows isn't. The scenes of posturing, smoking and talking about philosophy and art (which are numerous, and so quintessentially French that they're verging on parody) are passable, but could easily have been scaled back so that more time could be spent on the turning points in Emma and Adèle's relationship. And then there's the sex scenes...
I'm all for sex. Sex is great. (Again, I'm talking about in film. Perverts.) But here it feels glaringly out of place, despite the subject matter. The act itself isn't the problem, it's how it's handled. Most of the film is shot in natural light with a roving camera, but in the sex scenes the lighting takes on a harsher quality and the camera is often in a fixed position; usually one that will give the clearest view of the sexual gymnastics. It looks seedy rather than real. I didn't come away thinking Adèle and Emma are falling for each other, or are passionate about each other. I didn't feel I understood their relationship better. What I did come away with was a clearer idea of the practicalities of lesbian lovemaking. (Although numerous lesbian critics have their own qualms about these sequences. Namely about whether they're more about fantasy than reality.)
It's circuitously frustrating that one of the film's greatest strengths - stretching out the central relationship so that what would feel clichéd instead feels like life - is also its greatest weakness. Cut back the running time and you have a fairly straightforward tale of love and loss, but if you draw it out it becomes all to apparent that Adèle is nowhere near as interesting as everyone around seems to think she is.
Overall: 6/10
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