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Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

Now that Julie Maron's BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is coming to theatres in a feature film that not only won the very prestigious Palme D'or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and that it was smacked by the MPAA with the dreaded NC-17 rating for its explicit sexual content, and that there is an ongoing war of words between the film's two leads and its director, it should generate enough publicity for not only people to see the film, but to also hopefully discover this remarkable graphic novel.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour – review

This is rightly one of the most talked about films of the year, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Whether the film benefits or not from all the attention being paid to the graphic sex scenes, I don't know, but if you let that stop you from seeing the film you'll be missing one of the most honest and gut-wrenching portrayals of first love ever filmed.

I saw this film in New York City with a dear friend back in November, and we couldn't stop talking about it until she had to catch her flight to Washington the next day. We kept talking about Adele as if she was a real person, hoping the best for her in life. This is the real power of the film, drawing you in to the life of Adele.

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

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.