Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux make this three-hour romance worth the commitment. Kechiche’s close attention to everyday life is moving, though the extended sex scenes test the patience his actors have earned.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour is a moving, unusually patient romance, with bedroom scenes that badly need cutting. Abdellatif Kechiche takes three hours to follow a young woman’s first love, making room for the ordinary business that films often remove to reach the next important conversation. School, meals and attraction occupy the same stretch of life. That attention is the film’s chief strength, allowing us to become familiar with Adèle without pretending that we can account for everything she feels.
Adèle Exarchopoulos plays Adèle, a high-school student drawn into a relationship with the older Emma, played by Léa Seydoux. Exarchopoulos makes the familiar uncertainties of growing up feel awkward and unfinished, without offering a tidy explanation for each of them. We felt painfully protective of Adèle. In the close-ups, the uncertainty in her expression makes an ordinary exchange seem capable of doing damage. Kechiche’s screenplay, written with Ghalya Lacroix, is strongest when it allows her feelings to remain unsettled.
Seydoux gives Emma a self-possession that makes Adèle’s uncertainty more visible. The attraction is convincing because the actresses do not seem to be experiencing it in quite the same way. There is room for unequal confidence, and for the class differences that complicate their connection. Seydoux also prevents Emma from becoming simply the person Adèle desires: her performance suggests interests and feelings that Adèle cannot expect to share or fully understand.
Sofian El Fani’s cinematography stays close to the women’s faces, asking us to notice changes that a more hurried film would lose. The closeness works particularly well around the ordinary acts of eating and talking, when a face cannot help giving something away. Julia Lemaire’s production design provides the classrooms and kitchens that keep this romance connected to everyday life. Those spaces matter because the women continue to seem like people with lives to get through, even when desire takes up most of their attention.
The editing, credited to Albertine Lastera, Ghalya Lacroix, Camille Toubkis, Jean-Marie Lengellé and Sophie Brunet, gives these unhurried observations room to accumulate. At 180 minutes, the film asks a considerable amount of an evening, but much of that time helps us understand how thoroughly another person can occupy someone’s thoughts. The looseness suits the performances, allowing hesitations to count. Scenes can continue beyond the information they supply, giving us time to watch how the actresses respond to each other.
The sex is the clearest weakness. Kechiche lingers over bodies with an insistence that becomes distracting, and the scenes supply less understanding of either woman than their duration promises. A film this attentive elsewhere should be able to let an encounter develop without extending it until we start noticing how it has been arranged. Explicitness belongs in a film about desire, but here the staging starts to feel impersonal despite the actresses’ efforts.
Coming-of-age romances often hurry towards a moment when their heroine can explain herself. This one remains absorbing while Adèle is still struggling to do so, and it does not make her uncertainty seem like a problem the screenplay needs to fix. There is enough life in Exarchopoulos’s performance to justify the long stretches spent watching her do little of narrative importance. Set aside the full three hours, with fair warning that the bedroom scenes require some patience.
