A song of innocence and experience

Blue is the warmest color. It sounds like nonsense, but not for two girls who exchanged glances in a pedestrian underpass. Abdellatif Kechiche’s film Blue if the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adele), based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel with the same title – Le Bleu est une couleur chaude (Blue Angel), won Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes Festival; for the first time in the history of the festival two actresses won the Palm – the performers of the leading roles, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.

Everything lies on the surface: two girls fell in love with each other and were happy. After one of them fell out of love, which resulted in a painful experience of separation for her partner, both of them went their own ways. The simplicity and straightforwardness (typical of Kechiche, if we recall his previous works) are confusing, especially today, in the time of virtuoso exercises with the form. Why a film with conventional language became an art sensation?

To understand this, we need to understand the events in the film.

So, they met each other: an eccentric artist Emma (Lea Seydoux) with short blue hair and a young philology student Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos), who was looking for her place in the world. Their first short meeting in the pedestrian underpass – a mere second-long exchange of glances – is worth of a brightest erotic scene. Erotic scenes will follow – and plenty of them, but they are not the main attraction, rather serving as a picturesque embedment into the main narration; in a similar way classic nude canvas may appear in a film.

Kechiche develops the narration in a very detailed and unhurried manner; sometimes it even gets too detailed, showing how Adele changes. As for Emma, we reveal only her stable habits: her models are her lovers; her ability to seduce is part of her work; the body is the means of her creative work; she needs a physical contact for inspiration. It is much more interesting to observe Adele. Actually, there are three most interesting things: how the person travels, loves, and matures (maturing is a journey too, only in time). Blue is the Warmest Color is an educational novel about maturing, which gives way to a love story, and ends as an educational story again.

Probably, the most dramatic changes are in the end. We can see Adele with children in school, and Emma – with another partner at another exhibit. The main disparity now, when the story has almost been told, is not in the social strata of the heroines, although it is important for Kechiche, too. Adele (and it is the huge merit of the actress Adele Exarchopoulos) became a totally different person. Everything changes: her clothes, hairdo, face, and gestures. She looks and behaves like an adult. At the same time Emma (owing to Seydoux’s subtle and precise work), by and large, has not grown up, remaining an infantile character of her small artistic stage, where the surrounding is temporary extras, which are easily substituted.

A novel, unlike epos, is not focused on moral – that is the reason why it is pointless to look for a summary moral in Blue is the Warmest Color. A novel regulates the experience, rather than transmitting it. Adele goes from innocence to experience, whereas Emma – from one experience to another. The everyday routine of life wins over the brilliant career monotonousness, spiced with art – this is one of non-evident paradoxes of Kechiche, which brought all-European fame to this son of Tunisian immigrants.

In the end Adele leaves the story and takes the blue color with her, on her – she goes along a street in a blue dress and not with a broken heart, but what is harder, with a heart of an adult.