Watched: Blue Is The Warmest Colour
God. So many feelings and thoughts about this film.
I watched this in a packed cinema with a bunch of middle class British people, and I could hear people shifting in their seats as the now-infamous sex scene entered its sixth, and then seventh minute. There was something curious about it all - too intimate to really be considered pornographic, too defined by medium shots and tribbing (for fuck’s sake, tribbing) to really forget the decidedly male gaze behind the camera.
That ignores the power of this film, though - controversy aside, this film is phenomenal, thanks in no small part to the enigmatic, powerful and often-distressing acting of Adèle Exarchopoulos. Calling it acting feels like an insult - she burns through the screen. Often, her performance is muted, which makes the tears that come later all the more upsetting.
Most impressively, Blue Is The Warmest Colour tells a brutally honest love story without coming up with an artificially satisfying conclusion. Hearts are broken, and are still slowly being mended by time by the ending. There is no overwrought internal monologue - often, we’re forced to figure out what characters are thinking by the small shifts in their expression, or the way they walk, or by the things that catch their eye. It’s gut-wrenching and meditative, all at once. I can’t recommend this enough.