Blue is the Warmest Color

Blue is the Warmest Color was the winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2013. A French film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, himself Tunisian, the movie depicts a young woman discovering the ways of life and of relationships, and who is also on a journey of realizing her own sexuality. Far from relying on the tokenism that sometimes comes with stories that surround underrepresented populations, Blue is a meditation on the lives of young people navigating their feelings and their impact as human beings. At the same time, however, Kechiche is not willing to devalue the power of a lesbian romance film. He seems aware that lesbian love stories aren’t respected as much as their heterosexual contemporaries, and that comes across in Blue. The film touts a controversial 10-minute sex scene between the two main characters. This read to a lot of people as exploitative, especially coming from a male directorial viewpoint. I found this scene to be a radical departure from historical erasure of lesbians in art and society. The bluntness of the scene reads to me, as trying to subvert this erasure by forcing audiences pay attention to a lesbian sex scene for a prolonged amount of time. While there are some people critical of this ‘male gaze’ provided by Kechiche, I believe this misses some crucial points. In bringing a lesbian relationship to the screen, Kechiche doesn’t present the sensual and the intimate moments between Léa and Adèle as normal or quotidian. He revels in them, respects the power in them, and points to the poeticism of romance through meditations on tenderness. Complaints about the male gaze present in this film do, I believe have some merit. For example, it proves that while we are comfortable as a society watching lesbians on screen, they are still going about the business of first falling in love, then being in love, and finally falling out of love. For lesbian cinematic narratives, this is a pretty played out one. And the fact that this film wasn’t made by a gay woman shows where the film industry is at politically, where women rise as beautiful actresses more often than as directors. Despite these very real complaints, Blue pays respect to its characters by not relegating them to a stereotype. To deny a film mainly about women any representation of a male gaze is to deny an important aspect of reality. I think the subtle employment of the male gaze in the film is more integral to the psychology of the characters than critics would like to believe. Blue allows its characters to retain elements of mystery, and illustrates intense longing through gorgeous long takes and extended silences. Body language and facial subtleties put a lot of importance on the acting in Blue, and interpretation of these meditations is enhanced by the stellar performances of Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Kechiche illuminates the changes that mundane realities of day to day life can undergo when one is in love by deceptively simple means, and registers the smallest tweak in expression as a tidal wave of emotion in this powerfully tender film. –Sarah Johnson