The camera lingers on their full, sensual lips. When Emma and Adele kiss early in their relationship, a golden sunset shines in between their faces. “Salvation” is a loaded word, but Kechiche isn’t afraid to go big if he has to, and most of the time, the approach is appropriate. When she’s with her family, they eat in silence. Other parts of life can be in their orbit, but Adele needs Emma because Adele is alone. She can’t comprehend a future where she and Emma aren’t at the center of each other’s worlds. Other characters comment on her youthful look, and it represents her arrested development. Exarchopoulos' casting is perfect not just because of her performance, but because she doesn’t appear to physically age. What more could a young girl ask for? She could ask to grow alongside her partner. It’s also the movie’s turning point where Adele now has everything she wants. Kechiche briefly steps over the line of exploitative, but for the most part, he’s earned the scene because everything Adele has done has been leading to this climax. But sex is different, and in the case of Blue Is the Warmest Color, incredibly graphic. So to his credit, it’s tough to call the sex scene between Adele and Emma “gratuitous” because it receives just as much time as other scenes. If a moment is important to Adele, it should be important to us, and for the director, lengthiness conveys importance. Like every scene in the movie, Kechiche goes long. When Emma and Adele finally do meet up, Kechiche takes more time to develop their relationship, find their common interests, see how Emma brings Adele out of her shell, and then, 80 minutes into the movie, the sexual fireworks Adele has been seeking explode. Adele has to grow into the search, first with unsatisfying sexual intercourse, and then a brief kiss with a female friend that doesn’t grow into anything more. We know Emma will come back, but there’s no meet-cute here. The director takes all of that time teasing us. After the brief glance at Emma early in the movie and Adele having an intense sexual dream about her, we don’t see the blue-haired siren for almost forty minutes. Kechiche’s pacing is strikingly deliberate. But as the two grow older, Adele's adolescence never seems to fade and her desire becomes dependency as she feels her relationship faltering. The two start to fall for each other and eventually become lovers and partners. After some sexual discovery with a couple of classmates, Adele goes searching for her crush, and finds the blue-haired woman, Emma ( Lea Seydoux), in a lesbian bar. On her way to have a date with a handsome classmate, she passes by a young woman with striking blue hair. The story spans years, and begins with a teenaged Adele (Exarchopoulos) beginning to discover her sexuality. But even when the scenes run on too long, and we begin to float adrift, Adèle Exarchopoulos’s heartbreaking performance keeps us anchored in a tale of ephemeral love. The film can at times be heavy but it can also weave in subtlety through small visual cues. I have to give credit where credit is due, and my colleague Adam Chitwood perfectly described Blue Is the Warmest Color when he said after the screening, “It’s epically intimate.” At three hours, director Abdellatif Kechiche’s romantic drama lets us soak in every scene as we become intimate with its protagonist’s desire for intimacy.
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