Blue movie

Still in high school when our story begins, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is about as close to a blank slate as an adolescent can be. The daughter of working class parents, she likes books, but doesn’t like too much analysis to get in the way of her reading. She clearly loves to eat, but as yet has no notion of good food. A girl not yet fully aware of her allure, her hair is always spilling in her face, her outfits are utilitarian, her lips most often in an unwitting pucker. She accepts the amorous attention of a boy, seemingly because it’s just what girls are supposed to do. Or are they? That question hangs in the air from the moment Adèle first catches a passing glimpse of Emma (Léa Seydoux) in the streets of the industrial city in northern France where she lives. Those sleepy, sexy eyes, the way she seems so cozy with her female companion, the blue wash in her hair that echo certain hues in the canvases of Picasso’s blue period: Emma is the first person Adèle has ever felt such an intense response to, though Adèle may hardly be able to process what that response is. Desire? Fascination? Envy? A longing for a mentor? Emma is several years Adèle’s senior, a student and painter, a lesbian with no inhibition or uncertainty about her sexual preference or lifestyle. She will come to change Adèle’s life, become her live-in partner, introduce her to a milieu of sophisticates—and pretentious dilettantes. In the film’s most discussed sequence, she will plunge her into languid, elongated, exploratory sex. It is a sequence to get lost in, just as they get lost, wrapped in each other, a glorious wandering all over each other that director Abdellatif Kechiche shares with us in protracted yet carefully composed, evenly lit doses, long enough to reflect something of a lover’s trance. 

But Blue is the Warmest Colour isn’t about sex. Based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude, Kechiche’s film, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, is certainly graphic, but it is at heart a familiar coming of age story, as indebted to Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished 18th century novel La Vie de Marianne—which Adèle is reading when the film begins—as it is to Maroh’s text. Indeed, the film’s French title is La vie d’Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2, and its loose sense of time, of events rendered without urgency—the film is 179 minutes long, while the story spans years—is more akin to the rhythms of a novel, a form which cinema has often felt compelled to distance itself from yet from which it still has much to learn. There are scenes that by established cinematic standards would seem to be extraneous, yet one can argue that certain movies are more rewarding when they give story room to breathe. 

Not everything in Blue is the Warmest Colour coheres. There is a statement about class that isn’t fully realized, and some of the supporting characters lack dimension. I would concede that the sex is photographed in a somewhat voyeuristic nature—although accusing movies of voyeurism can be a little like accusing a desert of flatness. But the film’s insistence on finding its own pace, Kechiche’s attention to wordless exchanges, emotional tempests and youth’s reckless trajectory are all laudable and absorbing. The film is also a showcase for Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, who you might recognize from Midnight in Paris and Inglorious Bastards. I’ve heard that Kechiche put his actresses through the ringer, especially while filming the raw, explicit sex scenes. I can’t speak to the validity of his methods, but there’s no denying that Exarchopoulos in particular, jejune in the best sense, doubtlessly talented yet seemingly artless, is extraordinary. 
        

Explosive youth

Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) were born with dawn of the bomb—on August 9, 1945, their mothers side by side in labour in some London hospital just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were being decimated—and thus born into a dread-draped world that would thereafter seem always about to end. We meet them proper 17 years later, and when you’re 17 the world is always about to end. Which makes you cling to that one comrade who knows the score, understands the good fight and the woozy exhilaration of adolescent desperation, righteousness and possibility. The girls are best friends. They giggle a lot, dress alike, groom in tandem, hitchhike together and scan the culture for paths to higher meaning and purpose. Ginger, the more disciplined of the two, joins the anti-nuclear protest movement, and may become a writer. Near the film’s end, after much tumult, her father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola), asks Ginger what she’s working on. “A poem,” she replies. “About the future.” Ginger & Rosa, the latest film from veteran English filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando, Yes), is a coming-of-age story set in roughly the same heady period as Potter’s own youth. It is Potter’s poem about the past.

And it is a highly subjective view of that past. Ginger & Rosa adheres closely to its titular characters’ perspectives—Ginger’s most especially, since she emerges as the film’s protagonist—in the sense that people and politics and places come to us with the sort of texture and tone we might expect from an exceptionally smart and passionate teenager, but a teenager nonetheless. Ginger is lovingly imbued with nuance, complicated feelings and resonant contradictions, and Fanning, who is actually significantly younger than the role, and who was recently so wonderful in Somewhere, is nothing short of a revelation here. While many of the adults, embodied by actors as talented and intelligent as Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening and Christina Hendricks, conform more closely to mere ideas of adults: tweedy, intellectual radical role models on the one hand, a martyr-parent on the other. Roland, interestingly, is a notable exception. Interesting because he’s also the most irresponsible and flawed, the key factor in the how the story suddenly pivots and Ginger’s already frail sense of domestic stability snaps completely. Roland is charming, pretentious, frustrated, inspiring, loving in his way and appalling in his way—the adult most like a teenager. He weeps over Schubert. He moves into a cramped apartment at one point, claiming that there is “a poetry in small spaces.”

And the film’s poetry, too, is in the smaller narrative spaces it inhabits. As Potter hurls us into the high and contrived drama of the final act, Ginger & Rosa loses something of its emotional precision and often exquisite sense of place and time, but in its earlier scenes, which seem unconcerned with momentum, are almost moment-for-moment captivating and transporting, deftly dressed, photographed, and edited to a spare but sensual rhythm. Like Olivier Assayas’ recent semi-autobiographical masterpiece Something in the Air, Ginger & Rosa gives us a window into a time when the question of balancing the personal and political was boggling and urgent. That it explores this question through the story of two young women, and does so sensitively and strikingly, makes it that much rarer among coming-of-age films, and immensely valuable.