Ryan McNeil
I’ve said if before, I’ll say it again: as a film plays out its run, it takes on baggage.
It could be the baggage of hype, for instance three or four weeks of fans and media talking about how great it is. It could be the baggage of hardware, like…oh, I don’t know…a Palm d”Or. Or it could be the baggage of one part of it gaining notoriety – a particularly funny scene, or an intensely brutal kill. In opening one’s door to a film that has already hit a few stops on the tour, one must take it in baggage and all.
As I pressed ‘play’ on BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, I knew that it had divided some of my friends. I knew that some were calling it brilliant, while others overrated. I knew that it would be unusually long – clocking in at three hours. And I knew that it would involve several lesbian sex scenes, at least one of which lasted around seven minutes. The beauty of seeing so much so soon is that I don’t usually have to sort through these things in the decision-making process. Ordinarily, I can just let it wash over me. This time though, I needed to take a breath and sort through everything, and see where I weighed in on a larger debate.
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is about a french girl named Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) . When we first meet her, she is in high school and very much out of sorts. She doesn’t feel like she fully connects with her circle of friends, not at all helped by the fact that some of them seem to only be around to add to her confusion. Into this perplexity walks Emma (Léa Seydoux), a young lesbian artist with a shock of blue hair. At first she is only seen from a distance in passing, but when Adèle gets to meet her in a more intimate setting, she leaps at the chance. This opens a lot of doors inside of her – doors her friends are disgusted with, and doors her parents are hidden from. Still, by meeting this woman she connects with so completely, her path is set.
When we think about coming-of-age stories, and tales of intense first love, we don’t expect to sit with them for three hours at a time. With such a runtime, we see a lot of scenes carry on far longer than we’d suppose – in certain cases well after the point where we’d walk away from them and see who else has come to the party. Even some of the sex scenes, strange as that is to say. We’ve become accustomed to physical intimacy in commercial film lasting a certain amount of time. When it runs longer than that, we start to feel icky.
It’s the difference between glimpsing through a bedroom door that’s blown open a crack, and pulling up a chair behind that door with a cup of coffee and a snack.
But the length of everything in this film – from the intense sex, to the banal dinners – serve a purpose. They are there to build everything outwards and give us a complete picture. For instance, there is a scene in the late-going where Adèle and Emma sit in a cafe and discuss what has become of them and what they mean to each other. The scene is as intense, raw, and honest as anything I have seen in a very long time. One of the things that allows this is the patience the scene is afforded. We watch wave after wave of emotion wash over these women, and see them struggle to sort through some very raw truths. In any other film, this scene would only be afforded a few moments, lest it throw off the balance of everything else. Here though, the scene plays out for as long as it needs – having already been given the lengthy counterweights elsewhere in the movie’s runtime.
It’s a risky move, and it pays off well.
A film I love dearly once said “Real life is pretty complexed stuff”, and few films understand that better than BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR. It inherently knows that in order to stand apart, a film needs intricacies…and that intricacy only comes through great detail and balance. By boldly stacking bricks upon bricks and creating something bigger, the film allowed its most important moments to feel more important than many of its contemporary films. We are allowed to understand a great deal about Adèle, even if she doesn’t understand a great deal about herself. In lesser films, one wouldn’t comprehend why she’d want to lob hand grenades into personal relationships; in this film, we’ve been briefed fully on the topic.
So as I welcome BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR into my home, I truck all of its baggage in happily. I think nothing of its length, quite the contrary – I welcome it. I see it’s attention to sex as something original, feeling for the first time in a while that I am seeing something that I’m not supposed to be seeing. And I identify with its confusion as confusion we all wrestle with at some point in our lives.
One of my top five films of the last year. I hope to get the film on Criterion as they’re set to release a special edition later on as that’s the version I’m going to wait for.
As I streamed this film in glorious SD through my Nintendo, I found myself openly wondering how handsome it would look on blu. I might just spring for it when it drops in a few weeks.
I really liked this film, but I can’t for the life of me think why. Probably because it never feels like a film, it just feels really real. Which is probably due to the fact that it isn’t heavily edited and it spends a long time on single scenes. But in the context of the way the director treated everyone on set…sounded like a pretty challenging thing to work on. I guess it was a good thing that he was so hard on the actresses, but also, it would have been a horrible set.
That was my attachment to it as well – that I felt like I’d been a part of those conversations, and met those people. It gives its events so much time to live and breathe.
I was especially fascinated by the way the teenagers interact early on. The way they’re both uncertain and defiant at the same time. Not to be presumptuous, but did those moments strike a nerve?
Just a bit – but luckily I have far better friends than poor Adele,
I don’t think anyone could have *worse* friends than Adele!
Interesting what you say here about the film’s baggage, and I agree. Unlike you, I found the lengthy runtime a little daunting. That cafe scene in the end had me crying like a baby though…saw raw, authentic and immensely relatable; I don’t think I’ve cried like that in theaters all year! Great review!
1 – Smashing little avatar you have there.
2 – You aren’t the only person intimidated by long runtimes. It feels like every other day I read about someone seeing anything higher than 100 minutes and mumbling to themselves “Woah!” But like you say – without that length, the cafe scene doesn’t get the room to breathe that gives it such a wallop.
Great review. Adele Exarchopoulos gave a wonderful performance that felt so real and raw – like she was bearing her all. The length wasn’t an issue for me as long as it’s justified, and it was. It had to show the depths of their relationship in order to fully grasp the intensity that it has. The film itself was wonderful; it was the latter half that captivated me. All emotions were running, it was hard not to get caught up in the moment as I watched it all go from there.
(Sorry for the late reply)
Know what I like about the length? Think about all of the raw emotion on display in that scene in the cafe. The way we can see them so charged, so confused, so passionate, and so mixed-up. That only plays that way because of the time we’re given to let that scene fully play out…and we’re only given that much time because the whole film is that much longer!
Agreed. Nice perspective. I had a similar response to the film all around (my thoughts here http://silverscreensessions.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/love-in-2013-blue-is-the-warmest-color/ ). We even chose the same freeze frame! I was so refreshed by this film’s intimacy and honesty, and that cafe scene tied it all together. I felt like I was being torn apart with Adele.
You’re right on about how a film’s baggage can affect our experience of it, though. I wonder how this one will stand the test of time.
I actually get the feeling that this is the sort of film that will age amazingly well. I feel like much of the rhetoric that flew around about the relationship between the actors and director, and all the chatter about the sex will fall away and the film will be allowed to stand on its own two feet.
Thanks for the link, I’ll give it a read shortly!
I agree wholeheartedly with this. It’s refreshing to see a film about a contemporary young woman just living her life, without a lot of plot contrivances to “justify” our interest in her. While I do think the film would have been just as effective without the extended sex scenes, they only make up a few minutes of a three-hour run-time. The irony is, the inclusion of those scenes brought the film such notoriety that many people who wouldn’t otherwise sit through a three-hour character study decided to give it a shot.
A new visitor to the site who digs back a bit for further commenting? You’re my new favorite person!
Know what’s interesting about those sex scenes? It’s a rare example of a sex scene that’s needed to provide character information and contrast. After her that stone-cold (and wickedly accurate) scene where she sleeps with a guy and it goes…well as you’d expect sex with a teenage guy to go, seeing Adèle so elated and physically connected by her sex with Emma goes that much further to underscore how much this woman will mean to her.
In an age when sex-on-screen is primarily meant to titillate, seeing (a few) scenes that seriously inform a character is a breath of fresh air.
Again, thanks for reading, and don’t be a stranger!
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense. I do think the scenes were meant to titillate as well (I mean, obviously), but they shouldn’t be dismissed as doing ONLY that.
Yes, I’ve browsed around a bit, and this is a really good site with lots of content that I’ll probably never get through, but I’m sure it will be fun to try. Thanks!