Blue is the warmest colour chapter 2
#BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR CHAPTER 2 MOVIE#
While she doesn't tumble to the depths of her namesake in Francois Truffault's tragedy of obsessive love The Story of Adèle H., she belongs to the same class of those who feel too much.īut did I mention the movie is not just about sex? Another subject is class differences. There's a nasty breakup, a humiliating attempt at reconciliation, and life goes on. Patronized by Emma's sophisticated artist friends as a muse and cook, Adèle is isolated from her teaching colleagues by her same-sex relationship, and is desperate with loneliness.
Several years somehow slip by, as Emma and Adèle move in together, and grow apart. In the physical chemistry sweepstakes, they've hit the jackpot, which sets us up for the drop in the third hour of the movie when the affair disentangles. At the end of the round one, they look drained and exhausted by the intensity of their experience.
#BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR CHAPTER 2 MANUAL#
They women are avid for each other, investigating, experimenting, grabbing, as if racing through a manual of sex positions on a deadline. The sequence is rousing rather than than arousing. There's a plausible criticism that the women's movements are too choreographed and the camera placement voyeuristic, but Kechiche deserves credit for throwing coyness and caution out the window. The sex scenes are deliberately startling as a trumpet blast: a declaration of lust. With the more sophisticated Emma as the teacher, Adèle is an eager student. His close-ups are relentlessly intimate, immersing us in Adèle's world, the hand-held camera studying the array of emotions and other things on the actress's face: strands of hair stick to her cheeks, her nose leaks when she cries, and her mouth hangs open in a look of either surprise or hungry anticipation. The girls at Adèle's school, for example, go from gossiping friends to threatening accusers when they suspect her sexual orientation. Kechiche shoots typically in close-ups, with long talky scenes, that can turn emotionally from banal to loaded. They meet again Emma sketches Adèle in the park, and feels her out emotionally before they take the leap. Later, when Adèle wanders accidentally-on-purpose into a lesbian bar, she meets Emma, a fourth-year fine arts student, who is amused and moved by the teenager's crush. Adèle is both distressed and excited by her reaction. Then, one day, she catches sight of a pale, beautiful young woman (Seydoux) with a snub nose, confident gaze and blue-streaked boyish haircut. Partly in reaction to peer pressure, Adèle loses her virginity with the sweet, if book-averse school senior, but the experience leaves her flat. Her appetite for sex takes a few scenes to develop. Then there's the eating: Adèle has a hearty appetite for her family's favourite meal, spaghetti bolognese, gyro sandwiches and candy she hides in her bedroom.
Adèle's gossipy classmate tells her not to look, but a hot boy is checking her out. The early scenes establish two of the film's motifs: looking and being looked at, and appetite. The opening scenes are in a high-school literature class in the northern French working-class town of Lille, where the students are studying Pierre de Marivaux's unfinished early novel of sensibility, La Vie de Marianne (the French title of the film, translated as The Life of Adèle: Chapters 1 and 2, pays homage to Marivaux). Kechiche and co-screenwriter Ghalya Lacroix have substantially altered the story from its original source material, a tearjerker of a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, which begins with one character's death. Let's start with the movie itself, a character study of several years in the life of a young woman named Adèle.
But Blue is the Warmest Colour is too exceptional a film to be defined by its controversy. The winner of Cannes's top prize, the Palme d'Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.įive months later, the celebration has cooled, with criticism focusing on the director's indulgence and supposed predatory eye, bolstered by unflattering interviews from the actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux about his behaviour during the five-month shoot. The euphoria of first love and the pain of heartbreak, the discoveries of new ideas, food, art and sex are all part of Blue is the Warmest Colour, a film from Tunisian-French director, Abdellatif Kechiche.