BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR: To Love.

La Vie d’Adèle - Chapitres 1 & 2

Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche

Starring: Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos

Adapted from a graphic novel of the same name by Julie Maroh, director Abdellatif Kechiche's Palme d'Or winning drama is about a girl's coming of age into her sexuality and experiencing love. The internet and social media alike has been flooded with discussions about primarily the lesbian love-making scenes between the two female protagonists, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Also, I find it rather amusing, that comments on the film's viability and 'watchability' has been accounted vis-a-vis the Academy Awards, which I find rather amateurish. The decision to award it the highest honour at Cannes, by a jury headed by a 'leading' American filmmaker has been termed 'bold' but again, the assertion foregrounds the film's depiction of nudity as its cinematic marker, which I find again rather awkward. This film must be viewed  beyond that.

It must be said, that the fact which made me get interested in the film, is the Palme d'Or honour. Cinephiles, like myself watching foreign films, sometimes, without getting much into it, use awards as a marker to choose, and this was no different. I won't get much into the plot of the film, but just that the 179 minutes film is about the girl Adèle, who finds love in another woman, with a blue haired artist, Emma (Léa Seydoux). They share their love, passion and life together, and eventually lose it, and live it.

Blue is the Warmest Colour, at heart, is a relationship drama, and through it explorations of the time and moment has been conducted. Backed by stellar performances from the two leading ladies, so much so, that the Cannes jury opined they share the award with the filmmaker himself. As a cinema enthusiast, Adèle's depiction of Adèle is brutally honest. At the tender age of 19, she approaches the character with tremendous intensity and emotional honesty as does Léa Seydoux in her portrayal of Emma. Though cinema is a collaborative art, where the auteur fashions the narrative, it however needs characters to give it the requisite shape, the body, the heart and the guts. As an Indian, with the world's largest film industry in the country, in the 21st Century, it is recommended to be part of a world cinema audience, yet a petty comparative attitude cannot be ignored, and one cannot but marvel at the acting prowess of these two female leads, on whom the entire weight of the narrative lay.

Intriguing has been the social documentary in the film. Exploring lesbianism, a viable question can and would be raised, is how apt is Abdellatif Kechiche, a heterosexual male, in depicting a lesbian relationship and sexual encounter, through two heterosexual females. The politics of representation is to be looked at and can be questioned quite justifiably one feels. Julie Maroh, raises this objection.

Cinematically, shot with almost a historian's gaze and precision, each scene is crafted to meticulous detail. The director's craftsmanship and demanding methods, which made him shoot numerous takes, until his actors breathed the pain of the characters, almost drove his actors to mutinous thoughts. From the beginning, the filmmaker focuses his camera on the extreme close-ups of his female characters, almost alienating the external world to the background. However, thematically that has a contextual presence. The film explores with a wry sense, the difference in social class in the French society. Explored firstly through the two dinner table sequences, firstly at Emma's place, where her upper-middle class parents, both are aware and acknowledge their daughter's sexual orientation, rebellious and frank disposition, the blue streak and Adèle as her partner. Their choice of topics for conversation, the art, and Adèle's wishing to find something concrete (economically) offering the sustainability for the future is part of her middle class up bringing. Likewise, at her place, her father comments too about the need to find some concrete 'job' as means of economic security over other matters as art, life and passion. Adèle's parents think them to be friends, whereas Emma's are aware of their ongoing relationship. The choice of food offers a social document as well, from the apparently exotic oysters in Emma's place to the much more banal choice of spaghetti at Adèle's.

The metaphorical use of the colour 'blue' which gives the title is seen in the shades of the walls of the classroom of which Adèle is a student, to the light shade in the 'gay' bar which Adèle visits to most importantly the colour of Emma's hair and eventually to the dress which Adèle wears to Emma's art exhibition; the colour represents the freedom, vibrancy and liberation, as well as sadness. The change of Emma's hair from its striking blue to its blonde nature, suggest at the end, that Emma, the vibrant free thinking artist, has walked the road to success, and compromise. The visual symbolism, of the colour blue, which adorns, even the nude portrait which Emma had painted of Adèle during their earlier times, express the cinematic metaphor of transformation. Emma now, has compromised, and fitted in, whereas albeit in melancholy, and uncertainty Adèle is yet to. And as she moves into uncertainty, the film ends.

Politically this leads us to another question. Accepting the fact that cinema is basically a voyeuristic art, Kechiche, has in this film, stretched it to an unfathomable depth. His camera hovers around the ladies and apparently records their every movement, gesture in the most minutest of details. The question arises, both cinematographically and through the narrative, is whose gaze are we the audience being made to see? and in a larger context whose eyes are we seeing it through? Is it not another depiction of a failed lesbian relationship? Is not the auteur exploring, the female body and lesbianism through the tried and tested masculine gaze? Throughout the first part of the film, the extensive use of close-ups documenting the facial gestures, body parts and expressions, is deemed to show the intensive emotional experience of Adèle as she grows into her sexuality and into her own identity. Is the director not being unwittingly drawn into his own subjectivity in depicting Adèle's? Kechiche's obsession about the body of his female leads at times makes an uncomfortable presence in the film. It would have perhaps been better if he had let the two women enjoy the pleasure of the freedom he seems to grant the characters but not the actors. At the point of their breaking-up the hand held camera that almost stalked Adèle on the streets, interiorises wonderfully her emotional trauma and pain; pain experienced in reality as Léa Seydoux was repeatedly asked to hit Adèle the actor to extract every drop of pain possible to be depicted, and such demanding techniques gave as its result an unforgettable sequence of love. The questions however remains, is Kechiche, not asserting to that homophobic discourse, which deem the incompatibility of two women eventually coming together in the central relationship? Though Emma speaks about her new relationship, and family with Lise and the emotional bond, but it is sexless. To contrast it with the central relationship on which the film focuses, is based on sexual passion but at heart unstable. A note of intrigue is brought about at the apparent expression of 'femininity' in the later part of the film, compared to the assertive nature of Emma, a 'masculine' counterpart. Which one feels might be stereotypical.

The film however is about love, and the emotional depths it makes individuals reach. Though the homosexual point in the narrative gives it certain political issues, the entelechic issue here is love. The film is one of the most passionate and brutally honest naturalistic expression of love between two individuals. Love becomes the force through which freedom, social strata, gender politics and largely the construction of identity is viewed. It is the deepest recesses of the self, which the director reaches and makes his actors reach to extract out the tenderness, passion and ferocity which obviously makes love a motivating force, an adventure, which tears and builds and is everlasting. Despite the obvious questions the film would endure, one cannot but feel, that credit has to be given where it is due. In the words of Alain Badiou, "We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.” (In Praise of Love) 'La Vie d'Adèle' is perhaps the story of that triumph.

Image Courtesy: Wikipedia.