Blue Is the Warmest Color (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) by Criterion Collection

I love this movie. In every way possible I can express. It allows you to grow a heart of love, feel the power of enthrallment, teaches (perhaps for the first time) what intimacy is all about in countless ways, and yet shows you that unrepentant cruelty exists in the world.This is a spoiler alert. If you’ve not seen this movie, you definitely need to do so. But don’t read the rest of this review because it is going to dissect just one scene in its entirety, which will ruin the experience for you. Just so you know, the scene in question is the single most powerful performance in the theater I’ve seen since Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessup gave his YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH speech (which incredibly took just one take). It’s that powerful. I memorized Jessup’s entire speech because of the unyielding belief in self-righteousness expressed by Colonel Jessup.So here it is. I’m assuming you’ve seen the movie, so no set-up is given. Adele (magnificently portrayed by the most beautiful Adele Exarchopoulos) is driven home from a party by a male teacher. The first clue something is amiss is she directs him to drop her off at the wrong door, telling you she doesn’t want him to know where she lives. She then walks down the block and enters the home she shares with Emma where she is immediately confronted. Already, you can see Adele’s face grow troubled, as her face is an unvarnished window into her soul this entire movie. (There has rarely been an intro into the cinematic world as sublime as that given by the divine Exarchopoulos.) It is as if she is playing herself, and the movie is so wonderfully acted, it becomes impossible to know exactly where the actress herself ends and the character she portrays begins.When confronted, she first lies. But Emma is too worldly, with too much sexual experience and indeed power, to be fooled. Emma pushes, and pushes, and still pushes more, until Adele is forced to admit it was a man, not a woman, who dropped her off. Pushed more still, she admits it’s true, that she did have sex with him. But here is, in my opinion, the cleverest line of the movie. “Maybe two or three times” she admits to under forceful attack.But look at that line for a second. Had she said just once, she could have explained it away as “mere self exploration”. Emma is well aware that Adele had sexual congress with a male just once in her life, around age 16, many years ago, and may have accepted that explanation as a one off issue. This possibly could have saved Adele. That she instead admits it was more than once, means she is sure to face a harsh penalty.Two or three times? Not possible. Why? Because if true, she would remember exactly how many times it was. Twice everybody remembers, and three, again, she’d know that too. So, in fact, she’s admitting to five or more when the mind starts to grow fuzzy in the count, and Emma is smart enough to know that. That’s why she stops pushing to find the exact number, because the damage is now done and cannot be walked back.But the flaw here for Emma is that she, too, cheated. As you may recall, when they’re on the park bench talking much earlier in the story, she admits to being in a relationship for about two years, with Sabine. Shortly after that (a week?) comes the first love scene, which by all accounts, happened before Emma ended her prior relationship. It is this hypocrisy which makes her actions here the more cruel to Adele.Now that Adele has admitted the infidelity, she can no longer parry Emma’s rapacious attacks. Emma, being stronger, more worldly, and older by about six years, is in every way the more powerful of this unequal couple in mind and body, except in the love they deeply hold for each other.The acting here is incredible. I can FEEL Adele’s shame at her transgressions. I can TASTE Emma’s anger: I can SEE the relationship, within the briefest of moments, slip away into a verbal slugfest in which no one can end up a winner. Unable to fight back, Adele is back on the high school sandlot, being attacked by the cabal of bullies, but there, she at least put up a fight. Against the superior Emma, she has no defense. Her face is vivid in details of her destruction. You can see her body back away slightly, as if the vitriol being leveled against her has heft, has a weight of its own, and her body cannot withstand the blows. She has lost her will, and it’s terribly painful to watch in every way. My wife cried during this portion.The cruelty with which Emma attacks is startling. Always seen as loving and tender, especially during her drawing sessions of her muse, she has replaced her gentle stroking brush using words as rapiers, which stab at her lover’s heart, and intensively so. Repeatedly. She gives no quarter, and as quickly as it started, it is done, as is their love. She hits Adele in a manner that so startled me, I felt the blow myself, and it hurt. Adele is lost beyond words.Adele is like a young girl in the ocean, standing alone without a mother to guide her as Emma had guided her through the initiation of their love. A wave knocks her off her feet. She struggles, becomes upright, only to be knocked over again, and again. She ultimately becomes exhausted, and without help to set her upright, she lays in the water, smothered with the fury of the ocean, as it sucks her deeper down with a vengeance. There is no escape, and she must finally accept the fact that for some reason, fair or otherwise, she has lost this battle and the only response is to drown slowly in the sorrow of a life seemingly lost to indiscretion.When Emma physically removes Adele from the home, she slams the door so hard, the window bursts. This is done with great effect and is a masterstroke. It’s not glass breaking. Rather, it’s a relationship that is gone, and like the glass metaphor, it cannot be repaired, only replaced (which Emma does with her pregnant friend). Adele cries to be let back in, into the apartment and the life and arms of the woman she still loves, but there is no swaying Emma, and the entreaties go unanswered.I don’t speak French. For this scene, you don’t need to, nor need subtitles. Everything they say is conveyed in their body interpretation of what their mouths are saying. I stopped reading the subtitles, dazzled by the flying French and the expressions they elicit. Some things simply don’t need translation.Adele never went back to the place where her love was extinguished, either afraid of what she might find or hear, or realizing there was nothing she could do to calm the hurricane that has wiped her lover’s beauty off the map. When they meet at the diner, about three years later (we know that due to the age of the children she had with the lover who was pregnant at her graduation party that Adele did all the work for), we see two former friends, and the rest is beyond the scope of this review.The book upon which this is based has not Adele, but Clementine. Why the name change? I suspect because once Adele Exarchopoulos was selected for this part, they wanted her to BE the Adele she was portraying. Studies show that even in obtunded individuals, brains respond to often just one thing, and that’s their own spoken name. It's engrained into our psyches. By calling Adele by her real name versus Clementine, she BECOMES Adele, and that is very powerful.I believe the director, who was apparently difficult to work with (but worth the effort), has taken every trick out of his playbook to turn a book, which has a different ending, into a masterstroke of a movie. The acting is so real, at times I felt as though I were watching a documentary about love, lust, voracious passions, cruelty, abandonment, and every emotion in between.My wife and I are still discussing this movie five days later. It’s that powerful.If you are going to see one movie this year, this is the one to see.One last comment. The intimate scenes, the first of which lasts approximately 10 minutes, are not gratuitous in any manner. They are integral to this story of girl meets girl, girl comes out, girl finally loves girl. They convey how tender, powerful, forceful, sweaty and even how much work love takes. It is artistic beyond words. At times, I was wondering where one or the other women had disappeared to, only to realize their bodies were intertwined in loving embrace, making them become one where two had previously existed. To call this pornography is to call Michelangelo’s David “just a sculpture”. It is beautiful to watch, and is something you can’t help but wish you had in your very own life. Sadly, few do. And that’s the real shame here, because in the end, neither do Emma or Adele.This type of experience comes along so rarely, it is to be treasured. I will watch it over and over in the coming years.

The character Emma is too cold to care about, almost appearing predatory in the beginning. Adele at the same time is too "needy" and provokes a "ah come on girl" reaction. Yet-passion is passion, mindless and powerful. The complex emotions in the relationship are well directed and acted, and some may find it self-refernetional. The film is overly long, and the sex scenes could have been shortend by quite a it. It seemed ,at times, to be a voyeuristic film to tittilate straight men. Still-there are innumerable films that also focus on heterosexual passion-usually focusing on the female partners body. Still the sense of "longing" and later regret are extremely poignant to anyone who has suffered a one-sided emotional "divorce" from a partner. This is what the film portrays with excellance, and the reason it won so many awards. It's very good.This was my 2nd watching of this film. I did appreciate it more after a gap of 3 years, finding it to be more subtle and nuanced than I remember it. I did find the comparative difference between Emma's parents and Adeles to be painfully comic !An enjoyable film, a lot of emotions but not really your typical tear-jerker. It's not suitable for family viewing and will probably offend the average American Puritan. However, if you watch this film solely for the lesbian sex scenes, I think you may also have a problem.

Incredible acting..... the rare movie that stays with you....for the longest time. just amazing.

Lets address the elephant in the room first: THE SEX SCENES ARE NIGH PORN.No two ways around it. The most one could justify it as is "art", but really its obviously the unabated vision of a man's take on how he thinks two women have sex; probably mostly derived from watching porn. The story could have been told just has potently without 5 to 10 minutes of full contact sex scenes, which had no virtual or implied impact on or real connection to, the events that occur outside of them. Honestly, I had a difficult time getting through them, even before I knew of the controversy surrounding how the two lead actresses were treated. The tears from both actresses during these scenes , I suspect, were not scripted.As for the rest of the movie, I have nothing but gleaming praise. Acting, camera work, narrative, pacing, story, were all on point, and kept me hooked. The two lead actresses performances are stellar. The sheer emotion pouring from them in some scenes is palpable, and they do near flawless jobs of making both of their characters feel real and invested in the goings-on in their lives.One other thing that really stands out is the pacing. Large portions of the film focuses on mundane activities, specifically those involving Adele. These range from her in class listening to a lecture and other students , to five minutes of her and her family just eating dinner, close ups of them shoveling food in their mouths engaged in awkward small talk, or a minute long scene of Adele sitting on a bus just staring out the window enjoying the ride. I particularly enjoyed these moments, as I felt they reinforced a sense of normalcy: that Adele is nothing special, nothing in her life is special . and thus she is utterly normal (and thereby utterly flawed) just like the rest of us. It humanizes her and her life.In my opinion, this directorial technique was used masterfully in forwarding the narrative, and juxtaposed that more is sometimes more, even if it's still less. I suppose one could apply this same perspective to justifying the drawn out sex scenes. Yet I don't think this applies primarily due to how unabashedly raunchy (and dare I say, unrealistic) the execution is.Admst, all the angst, drama, passion and sadness that ensues, it all ends on a somber note, that left me feeling empty, yet still made me appreciate that that was the point of it all : to live, learn, grow, and move on.Definitely worth a watch.