Any believer in true love will tell you it’s rarely logical and often defies all explanation. Young love, which is at the same time nonsensical and the answer to everything, is even trickier.
‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ follows 17-year-old Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) as she enters a relationship with an older female art student named Emma (Léa Seydoux). It’s not so much a story about love as it is a story about identity, a concept that can be far more complex even while involving fewer people. Director Abdellatif Kechiche favors the extreme close-up, uncomfortable and unflattering shots of tortured faces swallowing tears and slurping spaghetti, in an attempt to isolate the characters throughout his film.
A good portion, if not most, of the shots in the movie allow room for no more than one character at a time, and the effect is impossible to ignore. In some ways, the film could be just as convincing without a speck of sound. Every emotion, from curiosity to confusion and desperation to resignation, is completely apparent on the 20-foot-tall faces of the actors on the big screen. From this we understand that these people are completely on their own and merely crossing paths, struggling to belong — anxious to be loved.
Nowhere is this more upsetting than with Adèle, the film’s protagonist. It’s hard to ignore how young she is. The opening scene of the movie follows her on her way to school. French literature is her favorite subject, but she says her English is also very good. Her friends tease her about a boy that probably — no, definitely — likes her.
She eats chocolate to console herself. It isn’t until a passerby with blue hair catches her eye that we get an idea of just how fragile her youth makes her. It’s instant fascination, but it’s also an ugly mess of other things, none of which Adèle is prepared to face. After her almost destined encounter with Emma in the first act, she’s haunted by fleeting flecks of blue: the painted cinderblock walls of a literature classroom and a girl’s painted nails caressing her cheek. Seeing Emma for the first time leaves Adèle stranded within her own identity, forcing her to juggle the expectations of her friends and family with her own personal need to find something ‘missing.’ Into the vacuum seeps the most desolate sort of confusion.
Even after meeting Emma again, Adèle still never fully seems to wake up. Their most unflinching love scenes, compared to the sad and saturated ones she reluctantly shared with her musician ‘boyfriend,’ still have a raw and living beauty to them — but they’re colored too dreamily. Halfway through the story, even after Adèle overcomes the dread and judgment from her parents and her friends, she still seems to wander. While she’s at last a part of Emma’s life, her face still betrays her want for something missing.
Her journey, then, is a search for self-discovery and not companionship. All parts of Blue build a stunning story, but it is the tragedy of stunted youth, not the beauty of love found at last, that gives the story life. To love another takes knowing oneself and in youth — at our most vulnerable — we can’t. As Adèle’s teacher explains the messages of Antigone, she tells childhood is not strong enough. The day she says ‘no’ is the day she cannot turn back.