According to the writer William H. Gass (in his great On Being Blue), blue is not only the warmest color, but the color that enlivens pretty much any kind of emotional state. “Blue is most suitable as the color of interior life,” he writes. “Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.” I don’t know whether Blue is the Warmest Color director Abdellatif Kechiche has read Gass’s book (the original title translates to The Life of Adele, loosely trying to at least thematically adapt Truffaut’s The Life of Adele H.), but he certainly understands this sentiment. Beginning with the most obvious way, Blue pays homage to its titular color visually, in nearly every frame. It’s not as if the palette is particularly bluish in hue; it’s that something (or several somethings) in the back- or foreground of every shot is dressed up in some kind of blue: sky, navy, cerulean, you name it. It’s on people’s fingers when the ink bleeds out as they write, in their clothes, on the walls, the color of the sheets they lay on to sulk or think or fuck, and most tellingly in their very eyes and hair.
But on a less literal level, the blue of Gass’s conception, the blue of interior emotion, overruns the whole three hours that is Blue is the Warmest Color. The story finds Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos, acting the hell out of the role), a high school student who loves books but is shy around romance, as she enters the formative years when the stuff she’s learning in class actually makes sense to her, and her friends can’t talk about anything but sex. She’s not exactly opposed to sex—and she’s beautiful, and has plenty of other students looking her way, though she’s just grown into that beauty and hasn’t figured out what to do with it yet. A well-meaning boy asks her on a date, and he does his best to charm her, but she’s half-hearted about it, and really only goes to bed with him because, well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? She isn’t sure.
Then Adele passes a girl with ice-blue hair on the street, and she can’t stop looking at her (she almost gets hit by a car in her effort to keep the girl’s eye line). She loses track of the girl, but luckily the blue hair makes her easy to spot the next time she sees her—at a gay club she attends with her best friend. The rest of the story follows Adele and the blue-haired girl, Emma (Léa Seydoux, who easily earns Adele’s fascination), through what seems like close to a decade in their relationship.
Reviews of Blue have focused on sex and class, and certainly both of those are understandable themes to pick up on in the film. On the sex front, it handles the tentative nature with which teenagers go about their business behind closed doors, in direct contrast with how aggressively they discuss it in public (and it’s really great to see the girls speaking just as vulgarly as the boys—in fact the boys are, if anything, sweet—which is something you’d never see in an American film). The sex ranges from awkward to passionate to painful, depending on with whom and at what point in the relationship. The film’s been criticized for being voyeuristic (which isn’t totally unfounded, seeing as the male director is filming two very young women, and the scenes are easily between five and ten minutes long…each). But I wouldn’t agree. Liam Lacey of the Globe and Mail has described the scenes as “rousing rather than arousing,” which is accurate. And anyway, in a year when The Spectacular Now got so much praise for being dead-on and raw about its look at first love, here’s a film that puts its money where its mouth is.
Class, too, enters into it. Adele and her family are working class, Emma and hers are bourgeoisie. Emma’s parents (and Emma herself) balk at Adele’s declaration that she wants to be a teacher because she loves kids—“you can find something you like, too,” says Emma’s dad, ignoring her—and Adele’s parents, who don’t even realize the two are dating, can’t understand what Emma means when she says she’s in art school. Adele’s parents eat spaghetti every night; Emma’s eat oysters.
But I think the film ultimately goes beyond class and sex. What we’re looking at in this film is the age-old Nietzschean Apollonianism vs. Dionysianism, or, put more crudely, the conflict between animalistic base instincts and higher-level logical thought. Adele is the Dionysian. She acts on emotion, on gut instinct. When she dates the boy, she does so because she’s testing the world out physically (same with when she impulsively kisses a female classmate). She has a huge appetite for everything. She can’t get enough helpings of her parents’ spaghetti, often chews with her mouth open, even eats candy as she cries after a breakup. She’s book-smart, sure, and she loves education, but even that she devours hungrily, reading whatever she can get her hands on, and she doesn’t like to actually “study” anything (she tells her first boyfriend that she can’t appreciate a book if a teacher makes her analyze it, and when Emma tries to get her to learn about famous painters, she can’t get herself to do it). When she becomes a teacher, later, most of what we see her doing with students is dancing around like Dionysus himself. And, when she sees Emma, she can barely keep her hands off of herself when she gets home.
Emma, on the other hand, is the logical Apollonian. Her response when she meets Adele is to feel her out, take some time, make sure the latter girl is ready. She’s a college student, and has a breadth of knowledge about art and philosophy and history. As before mentioned, even their respective food follows these roles: Adele’s household eats spaghetti in huge helpings; Emma’s family’s food (oysters, wine) takes a sophisticated palate to appreciate.
All of this might sound boring and pointless, but it clicks in during the key scene, an extended set piece at a party for Emma’s artist friends at their place once they’ve moved in together. At first, you’re led to believe that these people are cool, seductive: they’re artists, and they’re smart, and they actually seem like the emotionally-driven animalistic ones, following their hearts and not their heads. We think for a few minutes that this is what attracted Adele in the first place, these free spirits leading her away from her pedestrian life. But subtly, the scene shifts and we can see that, actually, they’re all a bunch of assholes (and they’re not even correct, as when the big-shot gallery owner makes his speech about women never making art about men’s pleasure). They all much prefer to talk about art rather than create it, even though Emma can’t stop berating Adele for not being an artist (Adele herself is art, both figuratively, in the way she passionately lives her life, and literally, when Emma sketches her for a gallery).
Is the film, at three hours, too long? Sure. Its three acts are basically 1. Adele-as-teenager, just meeting Emma, 2. Adele-as-teacher’s-aide, living unhappily with Emma, and 3. Adele-as-actual-teacher, picking up the pieces left from Emma. It could have been more succinctly cut down to that (and certainly there are scenes that could have been cut, like the well-intentioned but clumsily handled one wherein Adele’s high school friends turn on her, on a dime, when they find out she’s a lesbian, a scene surely only included because the film was released a week after France legalized gay marriage).
But that third act has a point to make, too, when Adele meets with Emma once more, trying to win her back. I’m teaching first grade now, she tells her. Older kids, but I love it. She’s trying to explain that she’s changed her animalistic ways, is growing up (she cuts her hair to look older, though Emma insists she’ll always look young). But Adele is not the way she is because she’s young, she is the way she is because she’s a Dionysian: impractical, impulsive, passionate, living from the heart. When we finally see her teaching these first graders, seemingly a tough disciplinarian teaching by the book, we hear a student read aloud from the poem she’s teaching them, by Alain Bosquet: “The poet’s poems are there to say all this and thousands and thousands of other things. No need to understand.”
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.