Blue is the Warmest Colour

Before viewing this film, I had expected a minor lesbian love story, viewed in a heterosexual perspective and I wondered what else they could add to the shallow at the time storyline. Then I viewed it, and my mental state was toppled.

Blue is the Warmest Colour follows two girls, one teenager and one young adult, as they fall in and out of steaming, hot love. It depicts several uncut sex scenes, in which heterosexual’s question “how do lesbians even have sex?” is answered, once, twice, thrice. I was wearing headphones whilst watching the movie, yet the moaning protruding from each actresses mouth had made me mute it for each entire sex scene. In all honesty, this movie felt like a pornography half the time. I was comforted to find out later that the actresses had some silicon shields placed over their genitals, seeing as they felt quite uncomfortable acting throughout these sometimes ten-day long sex scenes.

Its depiction of lesbian love was rather real, though. How explosive it is to be attracted to the same gender, how confusing it is, how repulsive the other gender becomes, and how one side of the relationship is accepting of the change whereas the other side is not.

I think that there is no need for the director, Abdellatif Kechiche to be deemed an ‘Arab persuading young French girls to take off their clothes’ – rather, he is a director who made the French girls work their ways up the ladder of exhaustion to bring the audience of the Cannes Film Festival a movie that is a deeper insight into the lesbian lifestyle than living through it themselves. Its intense scenes, whether it is fighting over cheating, fighting over accusations of lesbian love interests, the sex scenes or even the heartbreaking scene at the end in the art gallery, pulls the viewer by the earlobes and pulls them into a lifestyle that is followed by many.

I could see the exhaustion on the actress’ faces in most of the scenes. It was painful to see, and for the entirety of the three hours I was leaning on the edge of my computer seat, almost head-butting the screen, just to see whether things will or will not resolve between the main characters. Kechiche has captured something no heterosexual could ever capture as beautifully, and shaken the worlds of his audience.

Overall, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a must-see. It is an emotional rollercoaster, filled with love and hate and everything in between. It is the most accurate depiction of a love between two women and how fiery each experience may be, whether it is a good or bad one. Both Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos perform wonderfully in the film, and though they hated every second of the sex scenes, they made it look exceptionally real, to a point where it feels as though you are watching a lesbian couple making love in real life, while they are unaware of your existence.