“Blue Is the Warmest Color” is a three-hour movie, but it’s the dozen minutes of explicit lesbian sex that has kept it in media news.
Banned in Idaho and followed by a trail of critical controversy, “Blue Is the Warmest Color” has raised questions about sex and sexiness ever since its Palme d’Or win at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The most forceful objectors have argued that the sex scenes border on pornography, while supporters argue that there is honesty in the depiction.
The truth is less inflammatory: Much like “Blue Is the Warmest Color” as a whole, the film’s sex scenes start with noble intentions but quickly succumb to single-minded tedium.
“Blue Is the Warmest Color” follows Adèle(Adèle Exarchopoulos), an aspiring teacher, as she discovers her attraction to Emma (Léa Seydoux), a blue-haired art student. It keeps following Adèle as the relationship escalates, climaxes, deflates and inevitably peters out.
What’s initially interesting about the movie is its stern devotion to close-ups – director Abdellatif Kechiche rarely lets much above the forehead into frame and seems to avoid cutting to anything other than a face. This makes the film’s stylistic preoccupations strange: It implies the existence of a constant psychological probe, daring the audience to miss a single maneuver of the mouth, nose or eyes. It also tends to alienate – focused as it is on the characters’ facial expressions, the film loses the body language that makes interaction comprehensible.
Kechiche seems peculiarly invested in making the audience feel the whole duration of Adèle’s psychological coming-of-age – he goes so far as to include her life before her relationship with Emma, devoting an unusually large amount of the movie to her physically unsatisfying relationship with a boy. The relationship with Emma, too, seems longer than usual – rather than picking and choosing dramatic, compelling moments, Kechiche lingers on mundanity and odd, superfluous conversations.
Kechiche’s concept seems somewhat radical, at least: to portray a relationship with all its attendant parts — the dull, the dramatic, and somewhere in between, the sex.
But the combination of the film’s length and lack of formal variation (in which those close-ups start to seem very stubborn) contributes to a sense of diminishing returns. There’s only so much you can get out of facial expressions.
The film’s problem, ultimately, is that it’s too tasteful. Even the extensive sex scenes are done in such a middle-of-the-road way, stuck between erotic and clinical, that all they do is prove the point: Adèle and Emma have great sex for long periods of time.
This middling quality is also found in the performances, which is where the film would like to derive its power. Both Exarchopoulos and Seydoux do their best, injecting the appropriate emotions into this couple, but appropriate is dangerously close to conventional.
As transgressive as an explicit, sympathetically sexual tale might be in its conception, “Blue Is the Warmest Color” ultimately pushes very few buttons. Near the end, a hint of something more than art-house autopilot threatens the nice, bourgeois aesthetic.
Although none of the sex scenes were filmed to make this clear, Kechiche implies that Adèle and Emma’s relationship, based primarily on a monstrous and irresistible physical urge, was fundamentally destructive for both of them.
This is a fascinating idea, but Kechiche arrives at it far too late – the conviction is not found in the rest of the film.
The only indication of a director with more on his mind than a noble, not particularly insightful depiction of a lesbian relationship pops up at the very end, when the continual elision of resolution gives the glimmer of a more truly intriguing film. Before that, “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is rarely engaging enough to trouble even Idaho audiences.