Ever since I was a teenager, and in the early-though-not-quite-initial stages of my movie-going career, I've been going to movies alone. As Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer says in Annie Hall, when confronted on his proclivity for New York women, he says, "Well, not just, not only." Well, I don't just like going to movies alone, but depending on my mood or perhaps even the film, sometimes, the movies can be best enjoyed as a solitary act.
But as a solitary act, movies can sometimes be made more dangerous. As spectators, we are already voyeurs - sitting in the dark and watching the lives of others. But the voyeur of most movies is a bit different from the voyeur of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which has just arrived to Buffalo.
Last Sunday, I went to see it by myself not knowing what to expect. I came out of the theater under a hypnotic spell - drained, absorbed, enraptured. With all the anticipation this film has received and all that is being said about it, the experience of actually seeing it is wildly unprecedented.
When Blue Is the Warmest Colour showed at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it provoked intense response - it received as much outrage as it did praise. And chants from the galley bellowed that this is a three-hour film packed with one thing above all else: sex, sex and sex.
When the jury, chaired by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme d'Or to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche (Black Venus), and the two leading actresses, eyebrows were raised and suspicions grew - the film may have solidified its place in history as a movie that, like Pauline Kael once said about Last Tango in Paris, "will be argued about for as long as there are movies."
Much like Tango, Blue's actresses complained about their treatment by the director, and since it came to America, it has received its share of indignant response - the IFC Center in Greenwich Village has received complaints from parent groups for letting teenagers in to see the NC-17 film and the Flicks art house cinema in Boise, Idaho has refused to even show it.
There have been detractors who claim the film is one long patriarchal gaze on lesbian sex and the female appetite; and some say they don't know whether they are watching a porno or a film (they are quick to point out how most lesbian porn is made by straight men with straight actresses for male consumers).
This film may contain one of the most explicit, most intense sex scenes in the history of movies - but it is no pornography. Unlike porn, which supplies the tamest form of mechanized sex, Blue is an emotionally fused work that leaves its audience in a state of shock from its primitive power.
The sex in this film doesn't disturb its audience because of its physicality; it makes us uncomfortable because of its emotional aggression - the magnitude of visceral force has rarely before been brought so vividly to the screen.
Blue is at once the sexual coming-of-age tale of Ad??le (Ad??le Exarchopoulos), a high school student who begins a romance with Emma (L?(c)a Seydoux, Grand Central), an art student in college who is a few years older, and an epic love story.
Set in the northern French city of Lille, the story is spread out over many years. Much of the film moves melodiously and yet episodically. The French title is La Vie d'Ad??le - Chapitres 1 & 2 (Ad??le: Chapters 1 & 2), which is appropriate in its suggestion that life is a series of chapters.
The film is loosely based on a graphic novel, Blue Angel, written by Julie Maroh, and La Vie de Marianne by Pierre de Marivaux. At the beginning of the film, Ad??le is reading Marianne in her class. She later calls it her favorite book. Musings by her and her classmates provide a meta-commentary on the film through those discussions. And fittingly, Marianne is an unfinished novel.
Ad??le's transition from the pre-lapserian to the post-lapserian state entails her realizing that life does not weave itself into facile conclusions - the various elements are often left unfinished.
At first, Kechiche does nothing that hasn't been done before - he portrays the day-to-day life of an adolescent. (Spielberg would note that there is more of Truffaut in this film than Bertolucci.) The searing loneliness of Ad??le is what's most poignant and most affecting. But then, the film becomes one of the most in-depth character studies of recent memory.
The quotidian rhythms of her life are altered when she meets the blue-haired Emma. She first sees her one day randomly on a crowded street, and then runs into her again when she spontaneously ventures into a lesbian nightclub.
The two begin a rapturous affair - emotionally charged and physically explosive. The incredibly graphic sex scenes aren't there as a physical stimulant; they are there to express the characters' desires. The intensity of their eroticism is the only way they can articulate their feelings for one another.
Ad??le's inarticulateness itself becomes a character - nothing important is said by her; it is all implied. Emma's level of sophistication is a bit beyond her new lover's ken - she teaches Ad??le about art and philosophy, and she tells Ad??le to read Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism and explains the meaning of "existence precedes essence." Later, Ad??le jokingly proclaims, "Orgasm precedes essence."
As the years pass, Ad??le and Emma live together while Ad??le becomes a kindergarten teacher, and later she moves up to the first grade. For a film in which the immensity of feeling comes from the sense it possesses of passing time, the movie itself has the effect of stopping time.
As a cinematic bildungsroman, the film is largely about the development of character. And for all the rumbles surrounding this film about its sex, more time is spent on Ad??le outside the bedroom than in it. Kechiche is deliberate in placing Ad??le in a classroom throughout the story - it's about her learning and growth, her formation.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour doesn't suggest that sex is what forms someone, but rather, it plays a large role in shaping one's life. Ad??le's love affair with Emma is the learning of how to live while knowing that you will die and love will go.
Moments, minutes, hours and days after viewers leave the theater, they are likely to continue thinking of Ad??le. Exarchopoulos delivers one of the most daring performances ever - of a young woman teetering on the exultation of lust and the desolation of rejection.
At the end of the film, viewers will realize they are not watching a film so much as witnessing the most private, most intimate moments of a person's life. And whether they came with company or by themselves, they may leave the theater feeling more like a voyeur, but less alone.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour is now playing at the Dipson Amherst Theatre.
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