Trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfpOSmvzAW0
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278871/?ref_=sr_1
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Is_the_Warmest_Colour
Blue is the Warmest Color, also known as Adele: Chapters 1 & 2, is a 2013 French romantic drama film about a 15-year-old Adele whose life is transformed when she meets Emma, a blue-haired art student at a nearby college, who instigates a romance.
It won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and became the first film to be awarded the prize to both the director and the lead actresses. In addition, this is also the first film adapted from either a graphic novel or a comic to win the Palme d’Or.
The film is based on the 2010 French graphic novel Blue Angel (“Le Bleu est une couleur chaude“) by Julie Maroh, which won several awards and will be published in North America in October 2013 (on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Warmest-Color-Julie-Maroh-ebook/dp/B00EV6T6DQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383936700&sr=8-1&keywords=Blue+Angel). The film had its North American premiere at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival.
On 20 August 2013, the Motion Picture Association of America awarded the film an NC-17 rating for “explicit sexual content”. The film will be released without any cuts. The film is scheduled to be released on 25 October in America and on 15 November in the United Kingdom. However, director Abdellatif Kechiche stated in an interview in September 2013 that the film should not be released. Speaking to French magazine Télérama, Kechiche said “I think this film should not go out; it was too sullied”.
Plot: Adele’s life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.
Cast & Crew:
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Screen Writers: Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix
Producers: Brahim Chioua, Abdellatif Kechiche, Vincent Maraval
Main Actresses:
Adèle Exarchopoulos as Adèle
Léa Seydoux as Emma
Production:
Initially planned to be shot in two-and-a-half months, the film took five, from March to August 2012 for a budget of €4 million. Seven hundred and fifty hours of dailies were shot. Shooting took place in Lille as well as Roubaix and Liévin.
Production company: Quat’sous Films; Wild Bunch; France 2 Cinéma (co-production); Scope Pictures (co-production); Vértigo Films (co-production); Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF) (co-production)
Box Office:
Opening Wknd: $100K (USA)
Gross: $382K (USA)
Reviews:
Cannes Film Review: ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’
http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-blue-is-the-warmest-color-1200486043/
“I have infinite tenderness for you,” one woman tells another in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” and it’s a sentiment that also describes director Abdellatif Kechiche’s attitude toward his characters in this searingly intimate, daringly attenuated portrait of a French teenager and her passionate relationship with another femme. Post-screening chatter will inevitably swirl around not only the galvanizing performances of Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, but also the fact that they spend much of this three-hour emotional epic enacting the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory. The result is certain to stir excitement and controversy on the fest circuit while limiting the film’s arthouse potential, barring significant trims for length and content.
Still, it’s a measure of the honesty and generosity of Kechiche’s storytelling that the picture’s explicit sexuality and extreme running time feel consistent with his raw, sensual embrace of all aspects of life, an approach also apparent in the writer-director’s masterful 2007 drama “The Secret of the Grain.” Indeed, it would be reductive to slap an exclusive gay-interest label on “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a bildungsroman and first-love story whose deep and abiding fascination with life’s great shared pleasures — food, sex, art, literature, music, conversation — encourages the viewer to consider the commonality as well as the vast complexity of human experience.
Having previously examined the lives of artistically inclined youth in 2004’s “Games of Love and Chance,” Kechiche and co-writer Ghalya Lacroix (who also served as one of four editors) have narrowed their focus yet deepened their emotional palette with this very loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel, “Le Bleu est une couleur chaude.” Fittingly for a story about a girl’s sentimental education, the film’s French title, “La Vie d’Adele: Chapitres 1 et 2,” is a nod to Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished 18th-century novel“La Vie de Marianne” — an assigned text at the Lille high school where we first meet Adele (Exarchopoulos), a sensitive, unassuming 15-year-old with a passion for literature.
As the film soon makes clear, following a brief romance with cute classmate Thomas (Jeremie Laheurte), Adele also harbors feelings for women — specifically, for a university fine-arts student named Emma (Seydoux), a pale beauty whose short blonde hair is streaked an alluring, rebellious blue. After an encounter at a lesbian bar followed by a series of meetings, during which the older, worldlier Emma gently puts the nervous, inexperienced Adele at ease, the two eventually become lovers.
All this unfolds in Kechiche’s signature style of long, flowing conversations marked by overlapping dialogue, performed in a vein of seemingly artless naturalism, but sculpted with unerring precision and a strong sense of drive. Captured in dynamic widescreen closeups by d.p. Sofian El Fani, these sequences crackle with humor and tension that can build, without warning, to moments of piercing emotion, as when Adele is cruelly humiliated by her friends upon discovery of her same-sex inclinations. More encouragingly, Adele is invited over to dine with Emma’s warm, freely accepting mother and stepfather, who are perhaps too tidily contrasted with Adele’s stiffer, more conservative parents, who are blithely unaware of the nature of the girls’ relationship.
The audience, by contrast, is spared nothing. Given the film’s interest in the rhythms and nuances of human communication, the explicitness and duration of the sex scenes here should come as little surprise. Still, it’s scorching, NC-17-level stuff, if it gets rated at all; the individual scenes are sustained for minutes at a time and lensed from a multitude of angles, with enough wide shots to erase any suspicion of body doubles. Trying out almost every position imaginable and blurring the line between simulated and unsimulated acts, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux are utterly fearless, conveying an almost feral hunger as their characters make love with increasing abandon. Audience titillation, though certainly there for the taking, couldn’t be more beside the point; each coupling signifies a deeper level of intimacy, laying an emotional foundation that pays off to shattering effect in the film’s third hour.
While these experiences supply moments of powerful realization for Adele, “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is not, strictly speaking, a coming-out narrative; both women pointedly refuse to label themselves, and their experiences over the course of the film convey a clear understanding of the complexity of human sexuality. As the narrative jumps ahead almost imperceptibly a few years — observing as Adele becomes a schoolteacher and settles into a comfortable live-in relationship with Emma, now a burgeoning artist — the thematic emphasis shifts from Adele’s social anxiety and fear of being found out to the trickier matter of finding contentment within commitment.
It’s a simple, even predictable story, yet textured so exquisitely and acted so forcefully as to feel almost revelatory. Always persuasive as a dreamy object of desire, Seydoux nonetheless surprises with the depth of her control; she has moments of stunning ferocity here, revealing Emma as a generous, open person whose hard, judgmental streak is inextricable from her artistic temperament. But the picture belongs to Exarchopoulos, completely inhabiting a role aptly named after the thesp herself; with her husky voice and sweet, reluctant smile, she plays virtually every emotion a director can demand of an actress, commanding the viewer’s attention and sympathy at every minute. Taxing as the 175-minute running time will be for some audiences, those on the picture’s wavelength will find it continually absorbing.
Set in a vibrantly decorated, unmistakably French hipster milieu populated by aspiring painters, writers and actors, the picture feels at once contemporary and happily reminiscent of a time before technology and social media invaded the artistic sphere; computers and cell phones are almost nowhere in sight. As in “The Secret of the Grain,” the camera betrays an almost compulsive fixation with the act of eating, taking on particularly suggestive undertones when Emma teaches Adele how to consume an oyster.
Explorations in Identity and Pleasure
Messages of ‘Concussion’ and ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/movies/messages-of-concussion-and-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html?pagewanted=all
In “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, a French teenage girl discovers love, passion and heartbreak in the arms of another woman.
“I wanted to give Adèle the personality of a very courageous and free woman,” he said during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival this month. “She’s hungry for life. She’s open to let her desires play out.” Those desires lead her to Emma (Léa Seydoux), an azure-haired artist with whom she begins a torrid and enduring affair. (The film is freely adapted from a graphic novel by Julie Maroh.)
While the male orgasm is unremarkably straightforward, he says, a woman’s ecstasy is “mystical” and “an out-of-body experience.” Such overpowering intensity, he says, has motivated centuries of art in which “men try desperately to depict” that pleasure. To which a female party guest offers: “It could be their fantasy.”
But the scene also anticipates how some viewers might find his male vision of female passion problematic. Manohla Dargis of The Times said that while the characters were sympathetic, “Mr. Kechiche registers as oblivious to real women.
The longest sex scene in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” takes seven minutes of screen time, but some reports out of Cannes had it over 20 minutes. Within such hyperbole lay both titillation and condemnation, and the possibility that pleasure, with all of its complications, might be worthy again of both show and tell.
Jostling for Position in Last Lap at Cannes
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/movies/many-films-still-in-running-at-cannes-for-palme-dor.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
The camera and its misuses in the well-regarded French entry “Blue Is the Warmest Color” (“La Vie d’Adèle Chapitres 1 et 2”) could fill pages. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel “Blue Angel,” the movie was one of the more hotly anticipated competition titles in more than one sense. Before the screening, word swirled that it featured a 20-minute lesbian sex scene and one male critic overshared, if in more colorful language, that he had been told it was an onanistic fete. More pragmatically, this wildly undisciplined, overlong 2-hour, 59-minute drama tracks the sentimental education of its heroine, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), from 15 through her 20s and her life-changing love for another woman, Emma (Léa Seydoux).
The two meet by chance, first passing each other in the street — the effect Emma has on Adèle, then a high-school junior, is electric — and then in a bar. Although Emma has a lover, who conveniently disappears, she and Adèle become lovers. An hour and a half after the start, the two are tumbling in bed and while I didn’t clock their initial encounter, it goes on so long that a male friend jokingly complained about glancing at his watch.
In this scene, as throughout, Mr. Kechiche and his hand-held camera keep close tabs on Adèle. This intimacy is clearly meant to draw you into her consciousness. Yet, as the camera hovers over her open mouth and splayed body, even while she sleeps with her derrière prettily framed, the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else.
It’s disappointing that Mr. Kechiche, whose movies include “The Secret of the Grain” and “Black Venus” (another voyeuristic exercise), seems so unaware or maybe just uninterested in the tough questions about the representation of the female body that feminists have engaged for decades. However sympathetic are the characters and Ms. Exarchopoulos, who produces prodigious amounts of tears and phlegm along with some poignant moments, Mr. Kechiche registers as oblivious to real women. He’s as bad as the male character who prattles on about “mystical” female orgasms and art without evident awareness of the barriers female artists faced or why those barriers might help explain the kind of art, including centuries of writhing female nudes, that was produced.
“Men look at women,” the art critic John Berger observed in 1972. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” Plus ça change….
Cannes 2013: Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La Vie D’Adèle Chapitre 1 et 2) – first look review
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/23/cannes-2013-blue-warmest-colour-review
There’s a devastating mix of eroticism and sadness in Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, which returns to the style and setting of his 2003 movie Games Of Love and Chance. It’s the epic but intimate story of a love affair between two young women, unfolding in what seems like real time. There’s an interestingly open, almost unfinished quality to the narrative, although this could just be because the print shown here in Cannes was still without credits. The film is acted with honesty and power by Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos; the affair itself is a little idealised, and the film is flawed by one rather histrionic scene, though not, I think, by its expansive three-hour length. Nonetheless, this is still a blazingly emotional and explosively sexy film, which reminds you how timidly unsexy most films are, although as with all explicit movies, there will be one or two airy sophisticates who will affect to be unmoved by it, and claim that the sex is “boring”. It isn’t.
The movie is based on a French graphic novel, Le Bleu Est Une Couleur Chaude, by Julie Maroh, although the film had for me something of an early fiction by Alan Hollinghurst, like The Spell. Adèle (Exarchopoulos) is a 17-year-old at high school in Lille, a bright, idealistic student who loves studying literature, both English and French, and wants to be a teacher. (She will incidentally reveal later that she loves American movies by people like Scorsese and Kubrick – though it is Altman who is more of an influence on this expansive, garrulous film.) After a painful breakup with a boyfriend, Adèle goes with a gay friend to a bar, and sees a beautiful young woman with short hair, dyed blue, whom she has noticed before in the street: it is Emma (Séydoux), an art student.
Soon they begin a paint-blisteringly intense affair. Emma’s blue hairstyle means that the colour blue – a cleverly returning motif – becomes the colour of happiness. But as the couple grow up and grow apart, Emma lets the blue-dye job grow out and she reverts to her natural blonde colour. It is a bad sign: the beginning of the end.
The extended sex scenes have an explicitness and candour which can only be called magnificent; in fact they make the sex in famous movies like, say, Last Tango in Paris look supercilious and dated. (And it also rather exposes the confection of François Ozon’s Jeune et Jolie earlier in the competition.) There is something coolly, thrillingly uncompromising about the first sex scene especially, and also something quietly and inexplicably moving when Kechiche finally cuts from the end of that sequence to the crowd scene at a gay pride rally.
Food is an interesting motif as well. Emma introduces Adèle to her liberal and tolerant mother and stepfather over dinner; they are entirely aware of Emma’s sexuality and serve Adèle a sophisticated novelty – oysters. (A hint of Kubrick here? Olivier’s “oysters” speech from Spartacus?) When Emma comes back to meet Adèle’s conservative folks, however, the lovers have to stay in the closet and pretend Emma has a boyfriend. They get served some humbler fare: spaghetti bolognaise. Yet is precisely this kind of food that Adèle serves up at the party for Emma’s first art exhibition, cementing her submissive and domestic position in the relationship.
The darker phase of their relationship (presumably the second “chapter” of the title) is painful and there is ultimately much crying, and this looks every bit as passionate and real and un-Hollywood as the sex. I can’t imagine Jessica Chastain or Anne Hathaway ever doing the brutally authentic tears-mingling-with-snot look the way Adèle Exarchopoulos does it.
It’s a long movie, and by the end you may well feel every bit as wrung out as the characters. But it is genuinely passionate film-making.
SHOULD WE SUPPORT ‘BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR’? THE TOUGHEST ETHICAL DILEMMA OF FALL 2013
http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/55034261/blue-is-the-warmest-color-controversy?page=all
Hollywood is no stranger to allegedly unethical productions that earn esteem as classics (think of Apocalypse Now), but usually controversy arises after a film has been released. Only a rarefied few have seen Blue as of yet, and while their reviews are effusive, the behind the scenes drama seems to qualify these accolades a bit. It becomes troublesome to compliment the candor of the film’s NC-17 worthy sex scenes if the actresses felt pressured to perform them or uncomfortable with how much they revealed. Likewise, the lengthy running time reflects just how many hours — potentially unpaid hours — crew members spent working on the set.
The film is ineligible for the Foreign Film Oscar this year, but, like last year’s Amour, has the chance to compete among the English language films. Surely some voters who know about the controversy will hesitate before nominating Kechiche for Best Director. Regardless of what happened, pushing actors and crew members to the point of emotional distress is not the way to run a movie set. It remains to be seen what actually happened, but it doesn’t sound like things will be settled any time soon. And until then, it’s a tough choice — support a potentially unethical director or miss out on what sounds like one of the best films of the year.
Blue Is the Warmest Color: Cannes Review
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/blue-is-warmest-color/review/527347
Loosely adapted by Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix from the prize-winning Gallic graphic novel by Julie Maroh, the script is separated into two sections (the “chapters” of the French title) spanning a decade in the life of high school student Adele (Exarchopoulos), who lives in a blue-collar home in the northern city of Lille. We’re first introduced to her in class — in a scene reminiscent of Games — during a lecture on Pierre de Marivaux’s novel La Vie de Marianne, for which the teacher wonders aloud: “How do you understand that the heart is missing something?”
That’s the question the film tries to answer throughout its long and winding narrative, as we follow Adele during her first, unsuccessful relationship with a charming fellow student, Thomas (Jeremie Laheurte), and then, into the embraces of the mysterious, blue-haired art school chick Emma (Seydoux), whom she connects with in a lesbian bar after having seen her earlier on. As it soon becomes clear, whatever Adele’s heart was lacking with Thomas is soon enough filled by her burgeoning affair with Emma, and despite suffering the wrath of her gay-bashing buddies, she’s clearly hooked from the start.
And it’s easy to see why. Because once the two girls get into bed together, they forge a sexual bond that Kechiche captures in ways few directors have done before him, allowing their lovemaking to play out in extended takes that definitely cross the barrier between performance and the real deal. Yet, the bedroom scenes are a far cry from softcore porn or art-house exploitation: what they show — amid various positions, moaning and exposed flesh (not to mention suggestive oyster slurping, in one playful sequence) — is that sex and love can, in the best cases, become one and the same, uniting two people who might actually have less in common than they believe.
Such contrasts are explored in the film’s second half, which picks up after Adele and Emma have moved in together, with the former working as a kindergarten teacher and the latter pursuing her career as a painter. Having already hinted at the girls’ class differences during two family dinner scenes, Kechiche begins revealing how their disparate personalities and backgrounds, especially when it comes to art and culture, are gradually driving them apart — a reality that comes to the forefront at a party where Adele appears as the apron-wearing housewife among Emma’s friends.
It’s a compelling way to shift the story’s focus from issues of gender and sexual identity to questions of social belonging, and Blue winds up going beyond the original comic book to provide a sharp commentary on how couples struggle, and don’t always manage, to overcome their innate differences, even if the sex is still really, really good. And so when things eventually explode between the two lovebirds and Adele faces an arduous chagrin d’amour in all her blubbering, snot-dripping glory, Kechiche brings us back to the question posed by Marivaux, answering it in a way that’s utterly convincing.
Less concerned with classic storytelling than with creating virtual performance pieces on screen, the film features dozens of extended sequences of Adele and Emma both in and out of bed—scenes that are virtuously acted and directed, even if they run on for longer than most filmmakers would allow. But such a technique is precisely why Kechiche belongs in the same camp as John Cassavetes or Maurice Pialat, eschewing narrative concision in favor of the messy realities of life, and creating works that can be as ambitiously bloated as they are emotionally jarring.
Despite some of the longueurs, the central turn from 19-year-old Exarchopoulos (Carre blanc), who DP Sofian El Fani captures in every state possible, manages to hold it all together, and the actress can really make you feel things only suggested at in other movies, especially when it comes to the ecstasy and agony of a first relationship. Playing opposite her, Seydoux (also in Cannes film Grand Central) shows how much she’s matured from a gorgeous It-girl to a daring young talent, and this is clearly some of the best work in her short career.
With four credited editors (including co-writer Lacroix) shaping all the footage into a workable whole, the pacing and performances never slow down despite the running time, while the story feels like it could just keep going. Perhaps this is what Kechiche intended with his open-ended French title, although, as the film’s moving final sequence suggests, this chapter in Adele’s life has definitely closed.