11/26/2022 0 Comments Blue is the warmest colour trailerThe euphoria and misery-the life-or-death intensity-of first love. The director’s intention here is to portray the entire arc of a single relationship. More familiar with same-sex relationships, Emma takes the lead-only to be is surprised by the depth of Adèle’s commitment to her, and her willingness to subordinate herself to her lover. Instead, she finds herself drawn to Emma, a slightly older local girl, an aspiring artist, whose gamine haircut is dyed light-blue. (The film’s French title, 'La vie d’Adèle: Chapitre 1 et 2’, is more apt.) First seen at 15, as a bookish, slightly abstracted high school student, she’s pressured by her circle of friends to begin a romance with a handsome classmate, Thomas, but never quite succumbs to genuine passion. Set in Lille, it charts a decade in the life of its protagonist. (Kechiche has dropped hints that he might return to Adèle’s life in future films, that she might in fact be his Antoine Doinel.) 'How do you understand that the heart is missing something?’ asks her teacher in the opening sequence, and appropriately for a film so preoccupied by the virtues of a classical education, the question serves as a kind of rhetorical conceit-one that the remainder of the film spends contemplating, if never quite answering definitively. Astonishingly, it feels not a moment too long.īut the presiding spirit here, as in his 2003 drama L’esquive, is Marivaux: as a student, Adèle is first seen reading the playwright’s novel La vie de Marianne, a work which, like this film, offers a sentimental education of its youthful protagonist-and which, as with this one, is left unfinished, open-ended. Though shooting mostly in widescreen close-up, the camera is always precisely where it needs to be, and the cutting (no less than four editors are credited there were reportedly more than 280 hours of rushes) is surgically exact throughout. As a storyteller, Kechiche is a disciple of Cassavetes and Pialat, filmmakers who, while taking very different approaches, similarly sought to liberate realism from the confines of the tidy, ninety-minute movie.Īesthetically, too, he favours the same observational, seemingly improvised style as those directors, one which actually conceals a considerable formal rigour. The film runs 179 minutes most of its beats play long. The Europeans were prepared to accept that the film was about far more than just sex the Americans, by contrast, seemed unable to look beyond it.įor the record, the director, Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche, is remarkably even-handed in his treatment here, with the result that the lovemaking scenes are accorded neither any more nor less weight than any other: of Adèle eating, for example, or being bullied by classmates-or, later, teaching children at the school where she ends up working. In fact, outrage from the French was curiously muted, even as a number of high-profile American critics fumed and fulminated-as neat an encapsulation of cultural differences as one might expect. For the local film industry, one friend joked, 'this will make the l’affaire DSK look like a parking fine.’ Understandably, this had become something of a talking-point-not least because, in addition to being one of Europe’s most in-demand young stars (familiar to English-language audiences from supporting roles in Midnight in Paris, Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol and Inglourious Basterds), Seydoux is also a kind of French movie royalty: the granddaughter of Jérome Seydoux, the longtime chairman of production giant Pathé, and the grand-niece of Nicholas Seydoux, who holds the same position at Pathé’s chief rival, Gaumont. Early reports out of Cannes, from a handful of buyers and critics who’d caught a private early screening, had focused on this three-hour feature’s most salacious angle: a more than 10-minute-long sex scene which reportedly featured unsimulated intercourse between its two leads, French actresses Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. The camera is always precisely where it needs to beĬANNES FILM FESTIVAL: In the end, and somewhat to my surprise, it wasn’t really about the sex at all.
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