Emma is a different beast: she’s rebellious, artistic, and comes from wealth. The scene in the bar instead sparkles with awe and mystery, charged with Adèle’s thrill of entering a world unknown. Though Kechiche could have played this for laughs-a scene in a lesbian bar is rife with comic possibility-he’s far more fair to the character. Artlessness is not easy to act-doing so is nearly a contradiction in terms-but Exarchopoulos excels as a girl who totally lacks affect or guile. “Blue” is emphatically not the story of a love affair rather, it’s the story of a young woman who has a love affair.Īs such, the movie depends a great deal on Exarchopoulos’s performance. Only when she falls in love with the older, cooler, and more liberated Emma (Seydoux) does she gain some direction in life-or, more accurately, something that seems like direction. She’s a smart girl, but dislikes how her teachers force her to overanalyze her favorite books. Both do stunning work, but special credit is due to Exarchopoulos, who plays Adèle, the young woman at the heart of the film-it’s not for nothing that the French title is “La Vie d’Adèle - Chapitres 1 & 2” or “The Life of Adèle - Chapters 1 & 2.” Adèle is a high schooler without guile or direction.

When “Blue” won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the jury awarded the prize not only to Kechiche, but to the film’s two stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Its steadfast realism is not quite revolutionary, but “Blue is the Warmest Colour” is still a deeply affecting film, bolstered by excellent performances and, somewhat improbably, its three-hour running time. Most unprecedented are the lengthy, explicit sex scenes, but the entire film is surprising in its commitment to naturalism and ordinary life. What’s shocking is that these things all appear on screen. In short, things that happen to everyone. There are dinner parties, chance encounters, sexual trysts. There is nothing intrinsically shocking in Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Colour.” There are introductions, conversations, arguments.

Blue is the warmest colour scenes real