Film Adaptations of Thérèse et Isabelle and Le bleu est une couleur chaude: Is It Time to Shift Our Gaze?

This essay examines two film adaptations of lesbian novels set forty-five years apart: Therese and Isabelle, Radley Metzger’s 1968 adaptation of Violette Leduc’s novel Thérèse et Isabelle, and La vie d’Adèle: chapitres 1 et 2, Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, Le bleu est une couleur chaude. Using these two landmark productions and the respective novels from which they are adapted, this study offers perspective on the current critical utility of the male-gaze theory, highlighting it as a necessary passage of film theory, but also as one that is destroying itself.