In 2013, the Palme d’Or, the highest award at Cannes, went to a movie adaptation of Julie Maroh’s comic, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude. That year I was able to review the English-language edition of the graphic novel, Blue is the Warmest Color. It was an uncomfortable read, but for all the right reasons.
This summer, as part of my unusually high consumption of LGBTQ non-print media, I’ve watched several gay movies, including Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon and the live-action television adaptation of Tagame-sensei’s Otouto no Otto (My Brother’s Husband) , I thought it only fair that I finally make some time to watch the movie Blue is the Warmest Color.
I rented this movie on Amazon Prime Video, but it is also available on DVD, if you prefer a hard copy.
The movie is just under three hours long. The best thing about it is the acting. Both Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle) and Léa Seydoux (Emma) do a fine job of making stone soup out of a mostly empty plot.
Where the comic was nuanced look at Clementine’s spiral into drugs and death, the movie is a very conventional “girl realizes she’s gay” story. Adèle is a typical high school student. Her friends are obsessed with boys and sex and she isn’t. She tries to care about the attractive classmate who wants her, but realizes she’s faking it. When she sees Emma, she finds herself interested and when she meets her, even more so. Emma and Adèle become involved, they move in together and, ultimately after some years, they break up. As the movie ends, Adèle has become a school teacher and she seeks Emma out once more to talk, hoping, somewhat pointlessly, to get back together.
All of this would be satisfactory to me but for the director’s specific foibles. Abdellatif Kechiche, the director, has some serious issues about mouths. Clearly this director wants to be *in* the mucus cavities as things go on. There are many extended, close-up eating scenes, including 3 scenes of eating spaghetti in red sauce. The first one was weird, the second one was gross, by the third one, I just felt like I was being forced to deal with the director’s fetish. All kissing and sex scenes were likewise extended and focused on oral activity.
What was a fraught tale of dysfunction and emotional pain becomes a nice, slightly bourgeois, weepy romance, with some lesbian pulp moments.
IF you are looking for a lesbian romance with explicit sex, with good acting filling in the many spaces between the dialogue, this is a good movie. If you were looking for an adaptation with any reference to the source comic, this is not it. Adèle is not the comic’s Clem, this Emma is not Maroh’s manipulative Emma.
Ratings:
Acting – 10
Characters – 8 They were all too likable
Story – 7
Cinematography – 1 This movie is a brutal waste of the medium of film. It could have been filmed on a cell phone for all these closeups. No need to take up a movie screen.
Lesbian – 10
Overall – 7 I was hoping for more drug despair, not breakup despair.
Where the comic is about two people who were extremely bad together, this movie is about a woman who met the love of her life and lost her for no particular reason, just because that’s how it goes sometimes.
I followed your thread on twitter as you watched it today and i felt kind of bad having a private account and not actually being able to warn you about this one. Since the movie came out and the actresses spoke out, we learnt that the director made them really uncomfortable while they were doing the sex scenes, in a super creepy way. They actresses are phenomenal but i’m kind of grossed out now… Anyway, thank you for this review!
Oh, hahah! I knew about it before I watched it. In fact, I spoke about the issues in my review of the comic. Both Maroh and the actresses sued the director, so I knew what I was in for. The spaghetti thing was weird, though. ^_^ Thanks for worrying about me. The more I watch live-action, the less I think it’s for me, anyway. I just don’t really like movies.
All that and still a 7? You scared me away from this one. I don’t love live action much anymore either and I have an increasingly really really hard time separating out my feelings about actors or directors values and kindness in the real-world from any artistry they have on screen (basically, if they aren’t nice people doing kind things for other people in the real world, then I don’t want to support them financially). So seeing as what a XXXX this director sounds like and the nasty cinematography, I think I’m staying away. Thanks for the warning! >_<
I am not the audience for movies. This had some good things as a movie, but not for me. I wanted an adaptation of the comic, not a lesbian romance.
I watched, and I hated it nearly as much as The Draughtsman’s Contract. I found it mean-spirited, fetishististic, juvenile male-gaze tripe full of cliche after cliche and mechanical sex. Well-acted tripe, yes, but tripe nonetheless. I only found out later how badly the director treated the stars, but all I could do when I did was say, “I am not one bit surprised.” It was clear from the movie that he had no respect for the stars or the story.
I am happy that there is no relation to the source material. But I am afraid that even if I have the chance to read it someday, I will not take that chance, as it has been ruined for me.
The comic is completely different. The problems with the movie were unique to the movie.
Oops, I meant that, “I watched it not long after it came out.”
I hated it. I hate the whole “lesbian movies have to be unhappy” trope. I much prefer Imagine Me and You; it’s exactly what I want. A feel-good RomCom that just happens to be about two women.
I have enough misery in my life; I don’t need to seek it out for “entertainment.”