La vie d’Adèle: chapitres 1 et 2
Abdellatif Kechiche (2013)
The title sounds like a translation but it was hard to believe it was invented for the film (for all that the film’s French title is very different) and it wasn’t: the screenplay by Abdellatif Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix is adapted from a 2010 graphic novel by Julie Maroh called Le bleu est une couleur chaude. Before seeing this movie, I knew that it was about a lesbian love affair, and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with the prize being awarded, unprecedentedly, to the two main actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, as well as the director. I also knew that Blue is the Warmest Colour contained sex scenes lengthy and explicit enough to make it a succès de scandale (this may explain why it’s being shown in cinema chains as well as on the arthouse circuit in Britain) and that Kechiche had been accused of exploiting his two leads in these sequences. I knew virtually nothing else and I’m glad I was able to watch Blue is the Warmest Colour with relatively few preconceptions. (If I’d known beforehand, for example, that Exarchopoulos and Seydoux were among those who’d criticised Kechiche, I would probably have viewed the film very differently.)
There are hints from the start that this is going to be an unusually detailed character study. Kechiche shows Adèle, a high school student in Lille, going about her daily routine. She comes out of her house in the suburbs and, as she goes to catch a bus into town, adjusts her jeans – she does the same thing the next time she’s shown setting out and she’s always fiddling with her hair, which is the kind that never stays in place. Kechiche swiftly conveys what Adele thinks of her school teachers as well as describing her interactions with other students. In one sense, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a very simple story – what the French title says on the tin. That means it’s potentially very difficult to sustain interest but Adèle is a great character, wonderfully played by Adèle Exarchopoulos. Of course it helped that Exarchopoulos, who was just eighteen when she got the part (she’s twenty now), was new to me, unencumbered by the associations of previous roles. She’s so natural that she hardly seems to be acting at all yet you know this is because what she does is so skilfully shaped and expressed. The timespan of the film is around six years and Adèle changes considerably during that time. As a high school student, she has an exuberant, opinionated intelligence – there’s some good writing to illustrate what certain books and food mean to her – but she wants to teach in a nursery school and that’s what she goes on to do (by the end she’s teaching in a primary school). Adèle Exarchopoulos affectingly creates a character open to and continuously interpreting new experience. Adèle’s relationship with Emma, who’s several years older, leads to great distress and, as far as the viewer can tell, permanent disappointment for the younger girl. A good deal of liquid comes out of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s face – snot as well as tears – in the course of Blue is the Warmest Colour.
The early conversations between Adèle and Emma, as between Adèle and her short-lived boyfriend Thomas, are invigorating. French people of all ages, on screen at any rate, are forever aphorising and philosophising but there’s a reality to bright kids of conventional student age doing this. I especially liked the moment when Adèle complains about teachers telling her what to find in literature and, as she sees it, prescribing limits to her imagination; in response, the science student Thomas admits to being grateful to the teacher who pointed things out in Les liaisons dangereuses which Thomas wouldn’t have perceived on his own. Adèle’s relationship with Thomas (well played by Jérémie Laheurte) is a beautifully crafted part of the film. When they go to bed, her unhappy recognition that she can’t respond physically in the way that she needs is particularly strong. The sexual dynamics of the high school are always interesting – not least in the suggestion that, in this co-ed environment, boys are accepted as gay more easily than girls. At any rate, it appears that Adèle’s friend Valentin (Sandor Funtek) is known to be gay and doesn’t have a hard time because of it; and a scene in which Adèle is accused of being lesbian is particularly startling (although the actress playing the most provocative and bitchy member of the lycéennes looks too old). Adèle’s insistence that she’s not gay is a powerful mixture of anxious denial and anger that other people should be more certain about her sexuality than, at this stage, she is herself.
Although Léa Seydoux is an established name, I don’t remember her from other films I’ve seen her in (Lourdes, Inglourious Basterds, Midnight in Paris). As the blue-haired art student Emma, Seydoux is a striking presence; she too gives a very good performance (there’s an undeniable butch streak in Emma which she expresses subtly but strongly) – although it is more obviously a performance than that of Adèle Exarchopoulos. This is probably inevitable, given the conception and development of the character of Emma, who becomes a successful artist. (The visuals of this side of Blue is the Warmest Colour are relatively weak – the female nude statuary that Emma and Adèle gaze at in a gallery, and Emma’s own work.) Diane Kurys’s Entre nous (1983), also about a lesbian relationship, was released in this country as Coup de foudre, the French equivalent of ‘love at first sight’. Although that’s something of a theatrical construct, the love at first sight element of Blue is the Warmest Colour is substantiated by how Adèle, after she’s first glimpsed Emma, goes looking for her in gay bars, and how Emma then pursues Adèle. The second half of the film, which picks up the story of their lives together some two years on, is less strong because the decline of the relationship is structured more mechanically than the way in which it’s been developed. You don’t notice this at first: there’s so much going on in the extended sequence that begins the second half, in which the couple host a party, that it obscures the obvious indicators of things turning sour. The pasta that Adèle makes for the party is a touching reminder of her father’s culinary speciality – but, from this point onwards, you hear no more about her parents (Aurélien Recoing and Catherine Salée). Earlier in the film, when Emma came for dinner with the family, Adèle was obviously concealing the true nature of their friendship. Adèle’s parents must surely know by now that she and Emma are lovers; if they do, how has this affected their own loving relationship with their daughter? It’s because that relationship registered strongly that you feel you need to know what’s happened since: the lack of explanation sets a pattern for the remainder of Blue is the Warmest Colour and increasingly seems like convenient elision. It’s true that there’s not much background information in the earlier parts of the film either but I didn’t feel I needed it there. Because Adèle’s development is so rooted in her daily routine, the lack of detail of what life is like for her in terms of relationships with others at the kindergarten and primary school feels like an omission.
In the extended sex scenes between Adèle and Emma you can’t fail to be conscious of the actresses’ nakedness or of the beauty of their bodies. Even if Abdellatif Kechiche isn’t exploiting Exarchopoulos and Seydoux as women he’s exploiting their beauty – it would be tough to watch two less then perfectly formed naked people going through these couplings. The sequences are powerful, however, in a more positive way – in the relief that the two girls express in these moments when complications and ambiguities disappear. And because you can’t easily forget the bedroom scenes, when things go wrong in the relationship you keep remembering that Adèle and Emma had this physical and, it seems, emotional intimacy. In other respects too, Kechiche is very skilled in creating resonances between scenes showing the same activity but with differing emotional registers. These are never clumsily, even when they are closely, juxtaposed. The two girls’ visits to each other’s parents for dinner are nearly consecutive in the story and the contrasting menus are obvious but what you get from these scenes are the beautifully detailed atmospherics – Adèle, who hates seafood, giving into amiably firm pressure from Emma’s parents to try oysters, what Adèle’s mother says, as she talks to Emma, about getting a job and having a husband. There are other fine, less proximate juxtapositions. Sequences of wandering into bars and clubs: Adèle going to the gay bar in the hope of spotting Emma there and, when their relationship is falling apart, to a place where she expects to find a male nursery school colleague who wants to date her. Street demonstrations: it’s a relief to Adèle to be part of collective political protest after her relationship with Thomas is over – she’s less sure on the gay pride parade but she does want to be with Emma there. Adèle’s conversations on a bench near a copse of trees, first with Thomas then with Emma. And, perhaps most memorably, Adele’s dancing: you watch her taking part in a nursery school conga and you think back to her passionately involved movement, at her eighteenth birthday party, in the sounds of a lovely song called ‘I Follow Rivers (Deep Sea Baby)’ by Lykke Li.
30 November 2013
