The Sexual Politics of “Blue Is the Warmest Color”

The crucial scene in Abdellatif Kechiche’s drama “Blue Is the Warmest Color” isn’t the one that sparks the movie’s romance—the shot, in a street in Lille, in which the teen-age high-school student Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) falls in love with the blue-haired university student Emma (Léa Seydoux) at the moment that their glances meet—but the one that sparks their relationship. It takes place in a lesbian bar, where Adèle goes in the hope of meeting the blue-haired stranger. As Adèle, who is a high-school junior, leans forlornly at the bar, she gets teased and harassed by habitués—she’s young, and her ordinary, unstylized high-school look stands out amid severe hairdos, piercings, tattoos, and rugged or sharp fashion statements.

Soon enough, Emma shows up and protects Adèle (claiming that they’re cousins). Thus their romance begins and with it the movie’s great question: What does it mean to be gay without participating in gay culture? Or, rather, is there such a thing as gay culture that differs from homosexuality itself? Does the physical and psychological fact of homosexuality entail a distinctive place in society?

It’s a question that Kechiche poses all the more paradoxically inasmuch as the dominant aspect of the movie is physical. The scene in which the two women’s glances meet is directed as if their gaze were a bodily push—the camera is jolted no less than the women are—and Kechiche’s version of psychology is that of the idea made flesh. Whether discussions in the classroom, conversations in a park, or arguments in a schoolyard, the exchange of words comes off with the bodily force of an exchange of caresses, a playful wrestle, or a fistfight. When Adèle sits at the dinner table with her parents as they watch television, their passive petrification in the image is largely formed by the game-show host’s voice. And the now-infamous sex scenes with Adèle and Emma have an athletic, non-sadistic violence that is entirely consistent with the filmmaker’s ideas: it’s impossible to understand a couple without knowing how their bodies imprint each other, and the nature of their mutual physical hunger and their physical coalescence.

I’m astonished at the concern on the part of some critics that Kechiche films the actresses’ sex scenes luridly or leeringly. Those who express this concern seem to be reacting to the mere fact of a man filming naked young women rather than to the particulars of the film. When Kechiche films Adèle and Emma making love for the first time, he does so with one of the most jolting cuts in the recent cinema—from the women sitting together on a park bench to the two of them naked together in bed, tangling erotically. The immediate continuity from public to private life, from intellectual and emotional contact to the most intimate physical contact, without the intermediate stages of seduction or proposition or the sexual teasing of anticipation or buildup of undressing is the film’s very subject. In effect, Kechiche philosophizes the lovers’ bodies in the same way that he physicalizes their conversation. The dialectic of sex, with its tensions and parries, its comedy and its fury, is as much a part of their being as is their discussion of art, food, or family.

The French title of the movie is “La Vie d’Adèle Chapitres 1 et 2” (The Life of Adèle Chapters 1 and 2); the first chapter is that of Adèle’s days leading up to her meeting with Emma and the early time of their relationship; the second part leaps ahead many years—Adèle is working as an elementary-school special-ed teacher and living with Emma, an artist with a modestly thriving career. But the gap between those two sections hides an astonishing, almost novelistic amount of information regarding the characters’ lives. For instance, in the first part, Emma is open with her family of artists and intellectuals about her homosexuality and her relationship with Adèle. The younger woman, by contrast, is from a less sophisticated family and doesn’t come out to them, introducing Emma as a friend who’s helping with studies. It’s never made clear if Adèle has ever come out to her parents or whether doing so proved difficult. We never see whether Adèle remains in touch with her friends from high school; whether she ever manages to be open with her best friends about her relationship with Emma; whether Emma ever takes part in gatherings with friends of Adèle’s from university. It doesn’t matter (as it might in other movies)—and the fact that it doesn’t matter is both a sign of, and a tribute to, Kechiche’s art.

As the story leaps and lurches forward, the particulars of character become less important than the mind-body question, as Kechiche conceives it. What’s clear is that Adèle does her best to join in with Emma’s art-world friends but never manages to fit in. Adèle and Emma haven’t changed their styles much, either, and as their relationship begins to feel the stress of unresolved differences, the pull of social habits on the body—a paradoxical weight, a sediment of manners that stops the mighty gears of physical attraction and sexual desire—imposes itself with a terrifying force. Ultimately, both women drift in the direction of their long-standing community attachments.

Kechiche is what the French would call a republican; he was born in Tunisia, but his cinema is French. His subject, here—no less than in such films as “The Secret of the Grain” and “Games of Love and Chance”—is the conflict between cultural inheritance and group identification. And for Kechiche, the site of conflict, is the body. “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is a political film in the deepest sense; its harsh physicality is a visual sort of Occupy France, a struggle for an impartial but well-defined civic space where people aren’t threatened, literally or metaphorically, by religious, ethnic, or political-party bonds of exclusion. Yet, at the same time, he shows (whether in scenes of Adèle’s persecution in high school or her inhibition with her parents) that groups erect walls of identification as a psychological (and, when necessary, even physical) means of self-defense, when society at large doesn’t do so. His film is a radical lay work (no pun intended) of tolerance and inclusion—and the terrifying furies that ravage Adèle and Emma as their romance founder—seem to be ripped from France’s headlines.