FILM IN REVIEW: EVERYBODY'S ADOLESCENCE

1 8 1 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2) is such a fearless piece of moviemaking and acting that it seems an implicit rebuke to the nervousness that now rules our sexual attitudes. Read much of the current writing on sex, listen to discussions among the educated young, and you’ll find the expectation that sex should follow the neat strictures of gender theory. Or that it’s possible to strip the power balance out of sex, which, after all, is a dance of acting and being acted on. Maybe the vehemence of these discussions is the certainty that comes from inexperience or the result of too many emotionally bruising – or worse – nights in bed. Whatever the cause, there seems to be a desperate need to believe that consent will take the emotional risk out of sex, that sexual hunger or aggression can only ever be threats, and that they have no place in progressive notions of pleasure. And yet when I speak to other people who, like me, loved Blue Is the Warmest Color, the word they most often use to describe their reaction to it is devastated. People talk about coming through this movie as if through the turmoil of a love a√air they know they’ll never get over. They seem both scarred by it and grateful 1 8 2 T A Y L O R Y for the pain, as if the movie has made them feel more alive. The emotional toll Blue exacts is also its gift. At the Cannes Film Festival last May, the jury, headed by Steven Spielberg, hailed the film as a great love story and took the unexpected and courageous step of awarding the Palme d’Or not just to Kechiche but also to his two extraordinary leads, Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux. Accepting the award onstage, the trio were all tears and embraces. The harmony was shortlived : since then, ugly charges and countercharges have passed back and forth between Kechiche and the actresses – particularly Seydoux – with the women claiming that the extended sex scenes left them emotionally depleted and raw, and Kechiche, feeling betrayed, firing back. Then Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel from which Kechiche and Ghayla Lacroix loosely adapted the movie, derided the film for being inauthentic to lesbian experience . And the early ecstatic reviews were followed by critical grumblings that the film was a classic example of the way the male gaze objectifies women, with Kechiche’s critics astonished to find that he ignores gender theory and ideology. They’re right; Kechiche does ignore them – because he knows that the strictures theory and ideology impose on art and experience reduce reality, strip it of nuance. But this is all so much noise compared to the film itself. Blue Is the Warmest Color is an emotionally overwhelming evocation of the rapture and rupture of first love. Kechiche avoids both the dewiness of false innocence and the tears of false nostalgia that movies about romantic and sexual awakening usually invite. Blue Is the Warmest Color earns its tears, and they are scalding. Instead of fencing its young lovers within a petting zoo that allows us to mourn our lost youth from a safe distance, Kechiche removes the barriers that separate us from them. He brings the camera so close to the faces of his actresses that he seems to be trying to make their flesh more familiar to us than our own. At times, as they eat or kiss or sleep or merely drink each other in, it’s easy to believe that he has succeeded. Years ago, in his epitaph for Elvis Presley, the rock critic Lester Bangs began a sentence with the words ‘‘If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe . . .’’ Kechiche doesn’t believe it either. His story of Adèle (Exarchopolous) a French teenager who finds herself falling in love with Emma F I L M...