 |
| Blue is the Warmest ColorDirected by Abdellatif Kechiche Four Stars |
Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a work
of disarming emotional intensity. What begins as a coming out tale becomes a
coming of age one, and graduates finally into a harsh reminder that we never
exhaust the well of hard lessons we've left to learn. A relationship is a
two-sided blade, and in our youth we know not how to wield it. Sex appeals to
us first as an extravagance of adulthood and quickly becomes a haven from the
remaining tumult of adolescence. But that haven becomes a refuge, and
that refuge an asylum, an isolating force that no longer offers reprieve but
collars and represses our capacity to develop as individuals. We pour all of
ourselves into the symbiosis and lose our sense of self. If we’re lucky we
endure this cataclysm with time to recover before adulthood strips away the
barricades, before it exposes us. It was a lesson I learned the summer before college, I recall. Well, started learning anyway. It’s never a clean break.
If this is where “Blue” arrives, it sets its roots of premonition
deep and early. This is an almost epic examination of a girl’s sexual awakening
and emotional maturation. It spans years. The vein that courses through it all
is a performance by Adele Exarchopoulos that I emphatically insist deserves the
recognition of an Oscar nomination. Her Adele is a high school junior whose
pubescent detonation is made immeasurably more traumatic by the confusing
falsity of her liaisons with boys. She is distant. She keeps her ponytail
deliberately disheveled. She keeps to her beloved books and maintains an aura
of calculated indifference. Her friends are a juvenile lot, cruel and predatory
in the way that everybody remembers everyone else to be in high school.
She catches herself fantasizing about an elusive girl with blue hair she’d
passed on the street. She is upset. Her friends are not the kind with which one
feels they could share anything.
And so her discoveries (Not merely that she is gay. This is a film
with the tact to acknowledge that, for many, sexuality is a fluid orientation)
are made not in defiance but in shame. She meets the blue haired girl once
more, wandering curious and frightened into a gay bar late at night. Her name
is Emma (Lea Seydoux), a free-spirited art student unabashedly contented with
her own sexuality. She is an escape from the discord between Adele’s desires
and her social expectations. The two fall headlong into a wildly passionate
romance.
And then there’s the sex. Kechiche does not only refuse to
shy away from it, he makes it a primary engine for character development. I've
never seen a director use sex like this. Scenes that last for minutes on end,
in excruciating detail. Unsparing in his intimacy, he circumvents romanticism
and sentimentality and hones in on moments and images that seem antithetical to
the moment – the awkward fumbling of hands, the brief hesitation before Adele clumsily mimics Emma’s tactic of tempered spanking, a nose dripping snot from tears of
revelation (Kechiche is mindful to catch Adele in compromising or vulnerable
moments throughout). The sexual dynamic between Adele and Emma becomes the lone
barometer for the development of their relationship.
But there steals over us the sense that the world around
Adele is moving slowly beyond her. It is no accident that
large swaths of time pass unannounced, or that all the figures in Adele’s life
have vanished, leaving a void populated exclusively by Emma’s acquaintances.
Adele becomes a teacher. Emma finishes school and nears the precipice of
artistic stardom. In a startling scene, Adele moves dutifully through a party
for Emma’s first art show and becomes slowly aware of a disconnect between the
two of them. Emma grew up. Adele has not. She’s been left behind.
“Blue is the Warmest Color” is, finally, a film of great humanity,
delivered with ambition and courage, and predicated on an impossibly demanding
performance. Like any great film about a misunderstood or marginalized
minority, it does not cheer-lead for them, but affords them the dignity of
treating them like the complex, real people they are, world weary, frightened,
hopeful, desperate, tempering regret with the humor, extrapolating modest joys
from the banality of the routine. We are made small by our mistakes, enlarged
by our understanding them. This is a film that makes us feel large.
No comments:
Post a Comment