Synopsis
Commissioned by Julie Maroh and released in 2013, Abdellatif Kechiche’s award-winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color tracks the trajectory of Adèle, a high school student, and her coming of age struggles, and horizon stretching self identification, against the backdrop of France.
An ordinary high school student who is timid and academically bright but self questioning is Adèlle, who resides in Lille, France. Her life is completely transformed, and is kind of in touch with a new reality, as soon as she sees a woman of remarkable beauty, on the street, with a head of striking blue hair. Such a brief encounter, if you will, awakes and stirs inside her, feelings and questions which she has not, not yet, sought.
The woman’s name is Emma. She studies university and has the specialty of fine arts. She is rather bold and has the creative temperament and an artist by nature. The life of Adéle and Emma in their rest, becomes the central subject with the film. The film revolves around the life of Adéle and Emma, going beyond the normal and mundane, capturing and igniting the left of the Adéle’s hidden self.
Adèle develops new facets of love accompanying pains along with new identity and self- autonomy. Considering her age, he more confident self Emma assumes the dual role of a mentor and a partner in the case of Adèle as well. The feature unveils gently the changes in their relationship. Both of the women enter the relationship with their own hopes and aims individually and as a couple. Changes get put through the relationship in the enduring period put to the test as a couple. Although there is a lasting impact, the unchanged even do bring along a part of the separation.
Characters and thier life stories are given time in the film to ensure that the viewer is engaged and enveloped in the film. It is a calm, observative film recording parts of life with the history given. Eating together, strolling through the park, intense discussions and quiet moments where noone speaks and noone wants to blow the peace are all moments captured.
Though there is a journey, it isn’t as easy to follow. Blue is the warmest colour is, in reality, a film concerned with feelings instead of actions. It is a reflective film, intent on how love changes us individually, the fundamental need of a community, and how it is as a person, beautiful and sad all at the same time.
Cast and Crew
The film features Adèle Exarchopoulos capturing Adèle and Léa Seydoux as Emma. Both performances garnered acclaim for the honesty and complexity that they brought to the roles. Exarchopoulos especially shines for her natural ability to portray a young girl self-pondering and wandering.
Adèle’s performance is both monotone and very much alive. She is able to capture the complex thoughts and feelings of her character without articulating anything, and her audience is able to grasp the personal conflicts and the little joyous segments that she crosses during the film. The evolution of the character portrayed in the movie, from a timid girl in school to a lady in pursuit of something bigger, is a very subtle but impactful one.
Léa Seydoux as Emma infuses the character with elegance, intellect and power. Emma the artist, is fueled with pure emotion and her passion, and Seydoux is able to portray this with a very vivid and emotional intensity. There is a palpable connection between Seydoux and Exarchopoulos which is very realistic and heartwarming.
The meticulous detail and engrossing narrative style of Abdellatif Kechiche is heavily portrayed in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. His approach in the painting movie shifts from long, quite segments to handheld camera work. The result is a personal feeling film with documentary-like realism, letting the audience step into the character’s reality in a very intimate, detailed manner.
Sofian El Fani’s camera work captures the beauty of the everyday: soft natural light, expressive close-ups, and color, and color, especially the color blue. Symbolically, blue expresses the comfort, longing, inspiration, and at times, melancholia of the story. Paint becomes the comfort and blues of the day. Those tender blues calmly replicated in an intimate embrace to Adèle.
Themes and Symbolism
The self reflects in oneself and in the body of another, and comfort becomes the canvas. This embrace is painted tender. One of the central issues is self. Adèle in the body of a child feels, loses and finds, something.
The ache of dislocation. Adèle does not only transform in relationship to Emma. At first reshaped by the others, the friends, the teachers, the family, radially, Adèle finds her trajectory, the path taken becomes her own.
Actively passive. This gesture, that pours the rain of paint, an art of Emma, becomes the light softening the rigidity of the world. Paint, in the film, diagnoses the unsaid. Emma becomes, in vision, a painter rendering the repressed to the surface. In attending 🐝, still and in waiting, distance to the pain of her is covered. These moments paint the questions the film aches to express.
The film places great importance on the color blue, which takes the form of clothing, backgrounds, and other objects in the film and signifies changing emotional states. It can represent tranquility and safety, while the same color may also connote aloofness and emotional remoteness. The characters’ emotional trajectory can be mapped, in part, through the progression of blue in the film.
As for IMDb Ratings and Critical Reception:
The film Blue Is the Warmest Colour has an impressive IMDb rating of 7.7/10. It has been spotlighted by critics and audiences alike for its intricately woven narration, acting, and emotional genuineness.
The film received the richly deserved Palme d’Or prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, one of the most prestigious awards in the film world. Unlike most Palme d’Or recipients, however, the award in this case also went to the two main actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, alongside the director. Exarchopoulos and Seydoux were recognized for extraordinary acting, which this decision deepened in its rarity – and the overall award to emphasize narrative – emotional impact of the film.
The critics were quite daring in their framing of the film, referring to it as “raw,” and “emotionally honest,” as well as “intensely human”. The realism of the acting was also accompanied by the storytelling devoid of clichés, which instead adopts a more retrospective pace to examine the climbing and the sinking that come with love and growing up.
Much audience members did not mind the absence of handy conclusions. It supports the idea of silence, contemplation, and feeling emotions in a more existential fashion. It wants the audience to feel and not judge, to watch and not hasten.
“We all remember…”
It captures the decaying of the long summer and a masterclass on how to shut the hell up. It illustrates growing up within a world.
Blue is the Warmest Colour is a great piece of work filled with emotions, youth, and love with the power of acting, gentle direction, and visual techniques.
Found within all the heavy moments, you will embrace the subtle moments to which the film boasts. These moments not only have a backdrop score playing on a loop that hit like the proverbial third rail but come with a tapestry of poetic dialogue. You come to the realisation that blue is the warmest colour the moment you grasp what you have lost.
Blue is the warmest colour is unique with it’s pacing of story telling while being filled with truthful cinematography, clean pacing of the story and light cinematography.
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