Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I have just finished watching this movie for the second time.I only bother to review here possibly 1 in every 50 or 100 movies that I watch. I certainly don't feel inclined to review many of the less rewarding (read crappy) movies that I see, despite the lengths that I take to avoid buying crappy movies in the first place.After the first time I saw "Blue is the Warmest Colour", I gave it my personal score of 8.5; a score above 8 is a very rare thing from me.Having just looked at the awards that were garnered by this movie, and there were many, I see that Léa Seydoux has done very well for her role as Emma but, as was my feeling about this movie, it was Adèle Exarchopoulos who was really the heart and soul of the movie. Her portrayal of Adèle was simply heart-breaking.How can any actor/actress produce a performance of such incredible emotional depth with the ability to make the audience feel the emotional turmoil that she is feeling? Ms Exarchopoulos was quite remarkable and incredibly talented. Her ability to convey complex emotions for the cinema really has to be seen to be truly understood. It is incredibly rare and a real privilege to see such a performance. I have not seen her in any movies since this one but I look forward to seeing her again.This is a long movie at very close to three hours but it is rewarding and incredibly involving emotionally if you give it the time it deserves.I have nothing but the highest praise for the movie as a whole and for Ms Adèle Exarchopoulos in particular. She was incredible.JMV

this movie is pretty meh... it has like two great scenes in it and that's literally just because those scenes are made to be (surprisingly great) porn. everything else about this movie is boring. the filmmakers forgot that the one thing no one wants to see in porn is ,,story'' and scenes of people just doing things other than what you expect from porn. not just that but they added 3 hours of boring scenes to those 2 normal scenes that actually serve the purpose. final rating: 3/10 just because of these 2 amazing scenes it's not a 1 or 2

Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue is the Warmest Color" is often a study of facial landscapes. Specifically, that of Adele Exarchopoulos, whose performance is one of great ambiguity. She's the subject of countless close-ups, raw and real, without makeup, which would add a layer of contrivance to the performance.Her character, also named Adele, is confused and lost at the beginning of the film, and still confused and lost when the credits roll three hours later, several years later in narrative time. Such is life. Adele only experiences clarity and certainty while in the throes of passion with her lover, Emma (Lea Seydoux). They devour each other body and soul during drawn-out lovemaking sequences that are, shall we say, rather European in aesthetic. Although some might find them excessive, they aren't purposeless – the point is to show how moments of ecstasy and grief are inextricably tied to deep, intimate relationships. Kechiche's message? Love is extreme.However, the most striking image in my memory isn't the graphic sex, but a close-up two-shot of the couple's faces, where Emma's crystal- blue eyes are a burst of laser colour against a backdrop of pallid skin and white sheets. As the title suggests, blue is a visual motif throughout the film, and it has classically symbolised both tranquillity and sadness – more ambiguity. The first time Adele feels homosexual attraction is when she sees the openly gay Emma and her dyed-blue hair, in passing, on the street. The first girl to kiss Adele has chipped blue nail polish. At the end of the movie, Adele wears a blue dress. (Notably, the French title of the film is "La Vie d'Adele," "The Life of Adele," but the English-language title feels like the median between that and the source material, Julie Maroh's graphic novel "Blue Angel.")Kechiche reportedly filmed Exarchopoulos in her daily life, while eating, sleeping, taking the train. It's an extreme measure to take in the quest for naturalism, but it works. It has a hint of voyeurism, making the dramatic and mundane moments broodingly real. The consistency of Exarchopoulos' performance makes her characterisation all the more astonishing. She's extraordinary.The story begins when Adele is 17, in high school. She meets a sweet classmate named Samir (Salim Kechiouche), and sleeps with him. But post-coitus, she has an empty look on her face, of dissatisfaction and fear. She hurts him, as she must. Adele finds some clarity when the blue-nail-polish girl kisses her. Her closest confidant is Valentin (Sandor Funtek), who takes her to a gay bar, where she catches Emma's eye. He also rescues her from a cruel inquisition by a gallery of her peers. In such moments, "Blue is the Warmest Color" finds great dramatic focus, and we feel intense heartbreak as Adele's crisis of sexual identity is made public.Kechiche veers wildly from the suggestive and evocative to the explicit, which isn't limited to bedroom entanglements. He eavesdrops on Adele's lit-class lectures, and contrives to offer profound angles on her situation – big-picture lessons on love, tragedy, sin. The film is best when he ties visual detail into the development of Adele's character. Emma, a budding artist, draws Adele, and the scratchy, indefinite lines of the sketch show a woman in the process of finding herself. Later, Adele poses nude for one of Emma's paintings, and the picture is fuller, bolder, but still enigmatic in identity.The film follows their relationship over several years. They move in together, and establish careers, Emma as an artist, Adele as a preschool teacher. Emma's parents introduce Adele to the joys of eating oysters. Adele prefers to keep her homosexuality hidden from her parents, and the couple concocts a ruse to keep them in the dark. Their story is episodic and indulgent, yet compelling. It moves quickly. Its most consistent element is Kechiche's fascination with Exarchopoulos' face, so subtly expressive, it's Art... in Motion.

...Because this lesbian porno center in some basic LGBT-coming-of- age story is artfully dull and beautifully unoriginal. I was full of uninterested cringe in between subtle moments of reality, before full on laughing at a bad sex scene that showed awkwardness, rushing, and lack of awareness catered not to lesbians, but straight men. I've actual lesbian porn based in more realism than that 7 minutes of gasping, ass smacking, and borderline painful boob squeezing. And after reading the actresses complaints, I could see that being captured.Anyway, spoiler/trope alert: it's another lesbian film where the women don't end up together because LGBT movies are apparently scripted to be dramatic shots filled with sex, cheating, romance based on lust only, and settling for someone else because communication is for chumps. Long story short: it's an okay art piece that hit all the right buttons for people new to LGBT films, but those buttons are overly pushed and obnoxious with nothing gained nor lost in terms of originality. It felt forced and aiming less for LGBT exposure and more "look at these women finger each other for ROMANCE".