Affect and Narrative in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color

In The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Fredric Jameson distinguishes between two very different sources of literary realism. The first is the tale, which has its origin in storytelling and takes diverse forms in such genres such as the epic, the art-novella, the ballad, and finally the novel, Jameson’s particular object of study. All of these genres are motivated by what Jameson calls “the narrative impulse.” Recounting the adventures or the development of a central character or set of characters, they transmit a conception of time as a linear progression from past to present to future. The first modality of realism therefore engages the reader’s cognition, challenging her to integrate new narrative information into the developing story and to revise earlier suppositions as she reads. The second impulse, which Jameson variously calls “affect” and “the body’s present,” implies a very different sort of temporality. Rather than prompting the reader to correlate narrative events as the story unfolds, the second modality of realism plunges the reader into what Jameson calls a “perpetual present,” in which the immediacy of the moment overwhelms and suppresses the reader’s relation to historical time. These two impulses are co-present in the novels of Flaubert and his successors, Jameson argues, yet they do not mix. Rather than simply being in contradiction with one another, the relation between these “twin sources of realism” is antinomian (the difference being that, whereas contradictions can be resolved, antinomies cannot). Narrative and affect co-exist in the realist novel, Jameson asserts, but they repel each other like wax and water.

Released the same year as Jameson’s 2013 treatise on the realist novel, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2) bears witness to a similar tension between affect and narrative. Indeed, Jameson’s disquisition on the heterogeneous sources of realism seems tailor-made for Kechiche’s highly realistic film. Presented in two chapters as the cinematic bildungsroman of a young woman whose sexual self-discovery is catalyzed by her encounter with a blue-haired lesbian, the movie contains numerous atmospheric shots that serve no obvious narrative function. Operating as cinematic analogues of the literary phenomenon that Roland Barthes famously called “the reality effect” (l’effet de réel) in his 1968 article of that title, isolated shots of the heroine sleeping, smoking, or staring out of her bedroom window do something other than advance the plot. Even scenes that do advance the narrative are frequently filmed in ways that exceed the requirements of the story. The notoriously long and graphic sex scenes are a case in point, but virtually the entire film exemplifies a sustained, unresolved tension between narrative filmmaking and a type of cinematography that I will call “affective.”

This tension between affect and narrative is evident in nearly every salient aspect of the film. Through analysis of Kechiche’s camerawork and his editing style, his use of close-ups to capture the heroine’s ever-shifting expression, and especially the complex ways the screenwriter-director uses intertexts to refract the larger film text, I argue that Blue is both a highly self-conscious work of art and a viscerally engaging movie designed to make us feel as much as think.

“The Life of Adèle,” or, Antinomies of the Intertext

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Blue Is the Warmest Color, loosely based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same title, narrates two chapters in the life of a young woman coming of age in present-day Lille, a medium-sized city in northern France. The film begins with Adèle (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos) navigating her way through her junior year of high school. Urged by her girlfriends to return the attentions of Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte), a high school heartthrob in his senior year, Adèle agrees to go on a date with this Brad Pitt look-alike. On her way to meet Thomas in the city’s main square, she...