Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

mors, rumbles, and other palpitations have beset “Blue Is the Warmest Color” since it showed at the Cannes Film Festival, in May. The jury, chaired by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme d’Or to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and his two leading ladies. Clearly, this was a work to be reckoned with, but what did it contain? Sex, allegedly, and lots of it: untrammelled, unabashed, and practically unprecedented. We heard that the film was a love story about Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high-school student, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is a few years older, and that the dramatizing of that love would make us claw our popcorn into tiny particles. We even heard that the performers had complained of their treatment at the hands of Kechiche. In short, this movie has become a myth, gilded by an NC-17 certificate and crowned by news from Idaho, where depictions of explicit sex may not be combined with an alcohol license, and where patrons of Flicks, an art-house cinema in Boise, will therefore be forbidden to see the film. Heavens! If it’s all too much for Idaho, how will the rest of us cope?

Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

Big success in the film business often means opening a can of worms along with the champagne. The Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival went to the epic and erotic love story Blue Is the Warmest Colour. But the jury and its president, Steven Spielberg, insisted the prize should be accepted not only by the director, Franco-Tunisian film-maker Abdellatif Kechiche, but also by his two young stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Julie Maroh, who wrote the original graphic novel, dismissed Kechiche's adaptation as a straight person's fantasy of gay love. As for Kechiche, his feelings about that last-minute requirement to share the Palme with his two actors can only be guessed at – and the same goes for their feelings about his feelings. Seydoux and Exarchopoulos have since said he was oppressive, intrusive, and even tyrannical in the demands he made, especially in the extended explicit sex scene, which took fully 10 days to shoot.

‪Blue Is the Warmest Color‬

‪Blue Is the Warmest Color‬

CANNES, France (AP) — The tender, sensual lesbian romance \"Blue is the Warmest Color: The Life of Adele" won the hearts of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, taking its top honor, the Palme d'Or.

The jury, headed by Steven Spielberg, took the unusual move of awarding the Palme not just to Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche, but additionally to the film's two stars: Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. All three clutched one another as they simply accepted the award, one of cinema's greatest honors.

"The film had a beautiful French youth that I discovered through the long time filming the movie," said Kechiche at the festival closing ceremony Sunday. "It taught me a lot about the spirit of freedom."

Exarchopoulos stars in the French film as a 15-year-old girl whose life is changed when she falls deeply in love with some old woman, played by Seydoux. The three-hour film caught headlines for its lengthy, graphic sex scenes, but bewitched festival goers because of its heartbreaking coming of age story.