by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above: Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux as Adele and Emma
I’m not sure how to
begin. Nearly without fail, I react to
films with forceful clarity. I love
them, I hate them, I think they’re imperfect but with merit. There is, however, no concrete way to sum up
my feelings about “La Vie D’Adele – Chapitre 1 Et 2” (which has been released the
United States under the title “Blue is the Warmest Color”), a three hour love
story from France that is both real and crisply beautiful. Sometimes, with its endless parties and
conversations about work, life, and art, the film feels like real life at its
most boring. Yet often, it is everything
you’d hope a romantic drama to be—ardent, dangerous, and alive.
The movie’s heroine is Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a
teenage girl in the midst of her final years of high school, a world that the
film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, visualizes with both insight and clarity;
there’s an inherent hostility to the place, especially because Adele’s friends
often seem like interrogators, grilling her about her love life. Still, Mr. Kechiche captures the excitement
of the pre-adult academic world as well—the new ideas, the books to discuss, the
people to meet. And it’s also
interesting that in a way, Adele often seems detached from it all. In most conversations and class discussions,
she seems content to listen and observe.
Which begs the question: what is she truly passionate about?
Before long, the answer arrives in the form of Emma (Léa Seydoux),
an art student who Adele first notices as they pass each other on the
street. At first, they just exchange a
long, over the shoulder glance. But
soon, they’re meeting in a bar, in a park, and finally, in Emma’s bedroom where
they make love. They don’t really know
each other (their conversations often seem surface-skimming) but there’s an
intense and undeniable attraction, a need they both feel to be close to one
another.
There’s something wonderful about the way “La Vie D’Aele”
captures the beginning of their romance—the moment you see Emma waiting for Adele
after school, casually holding a cigarette, you get the sense that something thrilling
is afoot. And it is, despite their
differences. While Emma is a deeply
devoted painter, Adele is an aspiring teacher who approaches her work with more
measured, instinctual enthusiasm. Yet
Adele’s love for Emma is anything but measured. She wants to share her life with her desperately,
whether they’re lying in the grass and staring happily into each other’s eyes
or just drinking coffee together.
By immersing us in this romantic hunger, “La Vie D’Adele”
achieves something fantastic—it makes us fall in love with Adele and plead for
her life to be everything she wants it to be.
Yet the film makes you pay a painful price for your emotional
investment. While Mr. Kechiche makes his
movie just as coherent and accessible as a traditional romance, he’s
constructed something far more devastating—a portrait of a romantic
relationship that isn’t meant to be. Of
course, that’s also what Terrence Malick did in his recent drama “To the
Wonder,” but he severed the bond between his two protagonists with satisfyingly
poetic finality: they had tried to be together, but they simply could not. By contrast, in “La Vie D’Adele,” Adele’s
love for Emma seems to strengthen as their life together is shattered by
venomous arguments and weary last chances.
The pain is never resolved and Adele never really moves on.
But is the grim reality of the movie really a
problem? I’m not sure. Some viewers would probably say it’s not, but
I can’t help feeling that Mr. Kechiche drives himself (and us) into the same
corner of conundrum that Woody Allen discovered in “Blue Jasmine.” In both films, we’re introduced to a
beautiful heroine whose vulnerabilities and eccentricities we come to fall in
love with. And that’s the problem. Adele (and Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine in Mr.
Allen’s film) are not movie characters we can observe dispassionately—they’re
alive and infinitely knowable. To watch
them in pain is agony and it’s difficult to say whether capturing that agony
makes Mr. Allen and Mr. Kechiche ruthlessly honest storytellers or just bitter
sadists. In a way, their willingness not
to polish everything off with a neat happy ending is comforting because it’s
more relatable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard to endure.
Still, in that respect, the darkness of “La Vie D’Adele” is
perhaps less a painful flaw than it is an uncomfortable strength. And I would say the same of the screenplay
(which Mr. Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix adapted from Julie Maroh’s comic book),
which at one point allows the movie to dissolve into a seemingly endless convivial
dinner party in which characters exchange facile observations about life and
food and culture. This gargantuan scene
is positioned at the height of Emma and Adele’s romance and the mad rush of
conversation and detail (felt throughout the film’s midsection) mirrors Adele’s
jumbled romantic ecstasy; it makes sense that things would feel less coherent
to someone who’s fallen in love, even if viewing this scene is almost as bad as
attending such dully lighthearted social gatherings in real life.
Still, there is one party in the movie worth
remembering. About midway through the
movie, Adele comes home to find the house seemingly empty. But a moment later, she finds her friends and
family in the backyard, waiting to surprise her with a birthday bash. And there’s no dialogue here—just Adele
smiling when she sees everyone waiting for her, a moment that quickly
transitions to her blowing out the candles.
It’s a happy moment; a sweet one.
Right now, I’m finding that sweetness hovering in my
mind. It’s precious and beautiful and
certainly in good company. Adele may not
be that happy all the time but in a lot of ways, getting to peer into any part
of her world is a joy for us as viewers.
To that end, there are some wonderful and fascinating moments in her
bedroom, particularly the scene where we discover that, for times of distress,
she keeps and emergency box of Butterfingers under her bed. Seeing her sobbing while chewing on chocolate
is both tragic and funny, but even the quieter moments in that room are
memorable, like the brief, still shot we get of her sprawled chaotically in her
pajamas, exhausted and asleep. Seeing
something so private and casual could feel intrusive but it never does. Instead, you feel as if you’ve been invited
to share Adele’s life for the film’s three hours, just as she hungers for
someone to share hers.
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