Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s new feature, Blue Is the Warmest Color, is an overwhelming experience, one that can only be labeled with that now-hackneyed term, “epic.” In this case, no other designation seems appropriate. Although it boasts a running time just shy of three hours, Blue features no clashing armies, sweeping landscapes, or sumptuous period costumes. Rather, it is an epic of the heart, portraying roughly a decade in the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a sensual, thoughtful, and troubled French adolescent. Crossing the street one day, Adèle trades glances with Emma (Léa Seydoux), a swaggering artist with azure hair, and the thunderbolt strikes. In essence, Blue is the tale of all that follows: the white-hot lust and soaring love that develops between the two women, the shared life they vigorously work to build and preserve, and the wreckage that results when resentment and betrayal bring everythingcrumbling down.
In adapting the French graphic novel of the same name by Julie Maroh, Kechiche and co-writer Ghalia Lacroix have fashioned an ur-Breakup Film in the tradition of Wuthering Heights, The Way We Were, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like any good humanistic drama, Blue explores a plethora of themes and politics, such the roiling brew of class, gender, and sexuality in the high art world. However, its dizzying power lies principally in its perfect elicitation of a universal agony: the loss of a love. Anchoring the film’s anguishes and ecstasies are the lead performances from Seydoux and especially Exarchopoulos, who has the daunting task of carrying 179 minutes that include explicit lovemaking, vicious quarrels, and long stretches of silent cigarette-smoking. Like Exarchopoulos’ maple-brown hair with its untamable strands and snarls—dear Lord, that hair!—Blue Is the Warmest Color is mesmerizing and treacherous: It will break a viewer’s heart without pity.
