If there is one film to see this year, the Palme D’Or winning Blue is the Warmest Colour must be top of the list.
French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche (Black Venus, Couscous) delivers a tremendously rich drama about the joy and pain of losing a first love.
Set in contemporary Lille, the film charts a decade in the life of its protagonist (the film’s French title: La Vie D’Adèle, Chapitres 1 & 2 seems more apt).
First seen at 15, Adèle (a luminous Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a bookish, distracted high school student who after being pressured by her friends to start dating cute classmate Thomas, finds herself attracted to local art student/rebel Emma (Léa Seydoux), a slightly older girl, whose gamine haircut is dyed light blue.
So begins Adèle’s infatuation and at a whopping 3 hour screening time, Kechiche does not let up. His technique of keeping the camera on Adèle while she walks and talks, sleeps and eats and while she is having explicit and passionate sex with her blue haired lover, creates a magical form of physical and sensual intimacy. Amazingly, by the film’s end, the sex has (almost) faded into the background, becoming but one admittedly integral part of the spellbinding narrative fabric.
