Adèle is frequently shown, often in extreme close-up, with her mouth agape: while asleep during classroom discussions of Marivaux’s Life of Marianne (Adèle and her fellow Lille high-school juniors talk of “predestination” and “love at first sight,” just one example of Kechiche’s blunt telegraphing) and after sex with a male classmate, for whom she feels little physical attraction. That bouche appears incapable of ever fully closing. (The film’s original title is La Vie d’Adèle≼hapitre 1 & 2.)

In the first of the director’s many interventions in this loose adaptation, cowritten by Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix, of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une couleur chaude (2010), he changes the name of the original’s teenage protagonist, Clémentine, to match that of the actress who plays her: Adèle Exarchopoulos, a little-known nineteen-year-old performer whose mien, particularly her ripe, full mouth, evokes both Brigitte Bardot and Godard regular Anne Wiazemsky. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux).Ī HIGH-WATER MARK in cinematic lesberation or, as a New York Times headline put it, a “slutty impostor”? Examining the reception of Abdellatif Kechiche’s fifth feature, Blue Is the Warmest Colora sexually explicit but often fatuous tale of a sapphic sentimental educationsince its premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, has proven more stimulating than the film itself. Abdellatif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Color, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 179 minutes.

Emma blue is the warmest colour