By the time I arrived at the Michigan Theater for my 6pm shift, someone had already complained. The nice old lady who generally spent her free time before movies talking my ear off about the theater’s selection of caffeinated vs. decaffeinated teas had stormed out of an NC-17 rated French movie, and complained to a manager about her problems with watching, I quote, “lesbians sucking on each other.†If you’ve heard of the movie ‘Blue is the Warmest Color,’ you’ve probably heard of it in certain, defined capacities: it’s french, it’s about lesbians, and it has explicit sex scenes, one of them 7 minutes long. But the film is also much more than the sum of its controversy – director Abdellatif Kerchiche and his two lead actresses have created a masterful, exhausting onscreen love affair, a passionate depiction of an young woman’s awakening consciousness.
The three hour long film follows its young lead, Adéle (Adéle Exarchopolous), in tightly centered close-up, first as she lives her life as a normal French teenager, and then as she experiences the awakening of her desires through her passionate affair with a blue-haired, older woman (Lea Seydoux). Adéle functions as the physical center of the film, and Kerchiche’s camera never strays far from her body – she adjusts her uncombed hair, falls asleep with her mouth open, eats with abandon and cries messily.
The night before I went to see the movie, I spent a slow shift assigned to guard the screening room doors from unwary or curious children. After fifteen minutes of staring at an empty hallway, I took it upon myself to protect the innocents from inside the theater while I watched some of the film. I expected to be lost, at the two hour mark, for lack of context  – but I was immediately transfixed. I walked in on a scene that takes place well into the affair, wherein Emma and Adéle throw a backyard dinner party to showcase Emma’s paintings. Adéle cooks and serves food to the artistic elite as Emma showcases enormous canvases, her paintings of Adéle’s nude, posed body. Any conversation is focused around art analysis, incomplete and interspersed between food, drink and dance, so I was amazed both at how quickly the acting and direction conveyed the intricacies of the women’s relationship. Adéle is down to earth and practical, serving food, drink, and single-sentence descriptions of her career aspirations – ‘I teach.’ She emits an embarrassed glow when Emma recognizes her with a toast, but then sinks into disappointment and anxiety as Emma spends her night talking to another woman. Adéle listens to the PhD students and artists converse over her head as she nods along, the domestic partner; Emma debates with her highly educated friends about different artists (mostly visual artists famous for depicting the female figure) while they devour Adéle’s spaghetti and admire paintings of Adéle’s nude body. Later, in bed, Emma urges Adéle to develop her writing skills, wanting her to want something less simple, but Adéle resists – she is fulfilled just by being with Emma.
Although it’s easy to get a headache over tea lady’s insistence on being shocked by screentime devoted to lesbian sex, criticism of Kerchiche’s sex scenes has come from a variety of more credible sources, including Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel that ‘Blue’ was based on (who called the sex scenes “pornographic” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/movies/julie-maroh-author-of-blue-novel-criticizes-film.html). The sex scenes are uncomfortable, but not necessarily because of length. After all, Kerchiche lingers on Adéle’s walk to the bus, her tearful consumption of a snickers bar, the leaf in her hair – so why would he introduce brevity in sex, the realization of the affair’s intimacy? No, the problem is the change in tone. None of the messiness of sex is admitted – the female bodies are staged, posed, and pondered by the camera, but we see no glimpse of Adéle’s previous physicality, none of the character established by her unabashed eating habits and her moist, crying face. Kerchiche’s camera also breaks its tight focus on Adéle, continuity with which would mandate intimate sequences cut up by movement, and moves back to encompass both women. This abandonment of Adéle’s perspective has a weird effect; it seems that there is a third party is sitting in the room watching, and we become conscious of the camera and of ourselves as viewers. Ironically –  but maybe understandably –  the sex scenes interrupt the intimacy of the relationship.
Yet walking away from the film, I realized that I haven’t seen so much screen time devoted to women in the recent past, maybe ever (The Bechdel test exists for a reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s), and I’d never seen a filmed love story that didn’t struggle with, or fail to struggle with, a gendered power dynamic. The female form is an overarching theme – artistic depictions of the female, physical needs of the female, emotional awakenings of the female – and the movie is almost exclusively about the nuances of a love between two women. However, Kerchiche’s camera, script and direction do occasionally interject a male presence. At one point, a dinner guest and art gallery owner named Joachim speaks about male portrayals of female sexuality, arguing that throughout time male artists have been ‘transfixed’ by the perceived transcendence of the female orgasm, and that male artists have historically struggled to depict the mystery of female sexuality. Here, Kerchiche appears to be speaking through Joachim to preemptively admit his failures in understanding. It’s a little heavy handed, but it kind of works in that I do find myself giving giving the movie a break when it comes to the sex scenes, the anxieties about children and families, and that problematic mention of female sexuality as mystical – not because these aren’t real gaps in understanding, but because the rest of the movie is so overwhelmingly good that it transcends them.
As the love story develops with painful, feverish beauty, it’s hard not to be consumed by Adéle’s experience. The story of Emma and Adéle has universal, epic proportions: They live, they awaken, they make art, they suffer, they love. Yet at the same time, their relationship seems so close to us, so lifelike, so real. And although Kerchiche may filming with a ‘male gaze,’ the actresses are so talented and expressive that they practically gaze back – Kerchiche may have been behind the camera, but Seydoux and Exarchopolous undoubtedly played a part in creating their own characters. ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ is beautiful, painful, compelling. Together, Kerchiche, Seydoux and Exarchopolous have created a masterpiece.
