Blue Is the Warmest Color: Three Hours, Two Performances, One 7.1

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color runs three hours and never once hurries. The tagline is two words: “To love.” The movie takes 180 minutes to explain them.

Trailer, via Independent Film Company.

Adèle Exarchopoulos Meets a Girl With Blue Hair

The story is Adèle’s. She is a teenager when the film opens, and she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, and the meeting changes the shape of her life. The synopsis puts it plainly: Emma allows Adèle to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adèle grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.

That last run of verbs is the film’s structure in miniature, and it is worth noticing how little it promises. Growth, seeking, loss, recovery. No destination named.

Kechiche wrote the screenplay with Ghalya Lacroix, adapting Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude, which Glénat published in France in March 2010. The English edition came from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2013, the same year the film took the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Exarchopoulos plays Adèle. Léa Seydoux plays Emma. Those two performances are the film. Everything else in the cast — Salim Kéchiouche as Samir, Aurélien Recoing and Catherine Salée as Adèle’s parents, Benjamin Siksou as Antoine, Mona Walravens as Lise, Alma Jodorowsky as Béatrice, Jérémie Laheurte as Thomas, Anne Loiret and Benoît Pilot as Emma’s mother and stepfather, Sandor Funtek as Valentin — orbits them.

Three Hours That Refuse to Blink

Three hours is a long time for a love story, and Kechiche spends it on the ordinary. The film is classified as romance and drama, and it earns both labels by refusing the shortcuts either genre usually takes. There is no montage that skips the awkward years. There is no score cue that tells you how to feel about a breakup.

What you get instead is duration as method. Adèle’s life is changed by Emma, and the film insists you watch the change happen at the speed a life actually changes. That is a formal choice, and it is the reason the film has defenders who call it essential. They are responding to the same fact: Kechiche does not cut away.

The comic it comes from tells a love story between two young women in France across the 1990s and 2000s. The film keeps the emotional arc. What it buys is intensity.

What the Blue Hair Actually Does

Emma’s blue hair is the film’s one piece of pure image, and it works because the movie never explains it. It is not a symbol the dialogue unpacks. It is a fact about a person, and Adèle sees it, and something starts.

The title does some work of its own. Blue is the warmest color. The film holds that phrase for three hours and lets you sit with it.

Maroh’s novel was originally released as Blue Angel. The title changed for the film.

The People Around Adèle

Kechiche fills the edges of Adèle’s world with people who matter for a scene and then recede. That is not a flaw. It is how the film keeps its focus without making Adèle solipsistic.

Recoing and Salée as her parents give the film its clearest picture of the life Adèle is moving away from. Loiret and Pilot do the same job on Emma’s side, from a different class position. Siksou’s Antoine, Walravens’s Lise, Jodorowsky’s Béatrice, Laheurte’s Thomas, Funtek’s Valentin, Kéchiouche’s Samir — these are the people who populate a young adulthood, and the film treats them as such rather than as plot devices.

The film is built on Exarchopoulos’s face. That casting bet is the reason it works.

Where the Runtime Costs It

Here is the case against. A 180-minute runtime is not automatically a virtue, and Blue Is the Warmest Color does not earn every minute of it. There are stretches where the film’s commitment to duration stops being rigorous and starts being repetitive. The same emotional beat gets played twice when once would land harder.

The film also carries the weight of its own reception. The Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013 made it a public argument, not just a movie. That is not the film’s fault, but it does make it harder to see the film clearly.

What survives that noise is the central relationship and the two performances holding it up. What does not survive is the sense that every one of those 180 minutes was necessary.

The Numbers and the Calendar

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos Carry It

Strip away the runtime, the Cannes argument, the adaptation question, and what is left is two performances. Seydoux and Exarchopoulos are the film. Neither works without the other.

That is the part worth watching. The rest — the length, the reception, the comparison to the book — is context. Useful context, but context.

Blue Is the Warmest Color is a 7.1 because the center holds and the edges sag, and because a film that asks for three hours should give back more than this one does in its final stretch. It is still a film worth the time. Just not all of it.

Abdellatif Kechiche · Adèle Exarchopoulos · Blue Is the Warmest Color · film review · Léa Seydoux · Palme d'Or