The girls meet again on Emma’s timid first trip to a lesbian bar, and love swiftly blossoms – leading into some of the most graphically sensual girl-on-girl sex scenes in screen history. Dreamy schoolmate Thomas (Jeremie Laheurte) is all over her, but she can’t get a fleeting pavement encounter with blue-haired art student Emma (Léa Seydoux) out of her mind. Unlike so many same-sex-themed films that focus on coming out as the defining gay experience, ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ glides past that stage of Adèle’s life in a bold chronological leap, finding more nuanced drama in the evolving challenges of maintaining an unfixed sexuality.Īdèle is 15 when she senses something amiss in her dating life. Our heroine, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, astonishing), begins the film as a precocious high-schooler and ends it as a grown woman still with plenty to learn about herself. Nothing about the film’s coming-of-age narrative, nor the rise and fall of its core romance, is intrinsically new or daring, yet Kechiche’s freewheeling perspective on young desire is uncommon in its emotional maturity. ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ is the most brazenly singular return the ‘Couscous’ director could have made, and the richest film of his career to boot. Most directors would retreat into safer territory after an experience like that, but most directors aren’t Kechiche. An imposing biopic of the nineteenth-century South African slave-turned-freakshow-act Saartjie Baartman it proved too harrowing a vision for British or American distributors.
Its writer-director, the French-Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche, had a setback with his last film, 2010’s ‘Black Venus’. ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ is a minutely detailed, searingly erotic three-hour study of first lesbian love.
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