Critics reviews

...I think that Blue (and especially Kechiche) go so far in terms of underlining and circling and dog-earing the absolute particularity of lesbian desire that the film reifies it and its characters. The film becomes a fetish operation. We see this from the very moment when Adèle passes Emma on the street. This random fleeting moment is more than a meet-cute; it's like a a chemical reaction has just exploded in the middle of the city...

Kechiche's intuitive shooting allows for the most quotidian acts, which can be as minor as a timed glance or as violent as swinging arms, to become visually percussive in each scene. Amassed to nearly three hours, these everyday actions suggest the lithe spirit beneath Adele, and Kechiche's limber yet exact aesthetic mirrors her ravenous and entirely human curiosity.

When Adèle falls in love with Emma, the strategy of shot/reverse-shot starts to dominate, and aside from their initial meetings, their faces rarely share the same frame. This separation alters the whole structure of the film's visual map and mutes the first hour's passion... I would like to like Blue is the Warmest Color but I have to concede it ultimately is not a friendly piece of film... It captures how relationships start, but it sputters when showing them fail.

The beauty of director Abdellatif Kechiche's slow-burning and naturalistic depiction of a young lady's evolution through matters of the heart derives from the fact that its structure and themes are so universal that it's open season on finding a way to plug yourself into the drama. Three hours fly by, in a large part because of the committed performance of young star, Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Kechiche has said that he aimed to shoot the intimate scenes between the women to resemble painting and sculpture, and, troublingly, he has succeeded; the sex may be strenuous, but the staging is so artful that it evokes passivity... Ultimately, it is mainly the electrifying performances that Kechiche presumably elicited from Seydoux and Exarchopoulos that make Blue Is the Warmest Color a memorable film, however flawed.

Despite most recent reports, Blue is the Warmest Color is actually a superb French film and not simply a destructive wave of controversy waiting to engulf your news feed... Blue is the Warmest Color is not just about the rush of intimacy one feels after meeting a new love; it deals honestly with the changes that ultimately challenge each relationship to go against the grain of societal expectations.

Blue is the Warmest Color is a movie of constant, sometimes rocky evolution, a form it shares with that of a turbulent romantic relationship. It channels inward on a plot level but expands consistently outward in terms of resonance, starting out as a film tuned in to the coming out process and its interpersonal repercussions and concluding as a remarkably sensitive, all-inclusive portrait of the challenges and rewards of having a significant other.

The cinematography by Sofian El Fani gives the film a slow and sensual feel, with its heavy soft-focus coupled with frequent shallow depth of field used to distance the two characters from the rest of the world as the pair grow up and apart. When the two characters are apart, the film turns from a poetic, sensory exploration of a couple to a messy and chaotic cinema verité style, which reveals the natural ugliness of human life in a modern city.

This sort of thing is exactly what sets off the most stimulating kinds of post-moviegoing discussions. If "Blue is the Warmest Color" is not a masterpiece, and I don't think it is, it's certainly a provocation, but not a puerile one. Its multi-chambered heart is certainly in one or two of the right places, let's say.

In truth, it isn't sex per se that makes "Blue Is the Warmest Color" problematic; it's the patriarchal anxieties about sex, female appetite and maternity that leach into its sights and sounds and the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body.

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.

It's a vivid and vibrant film, alive with color and life, that's both social and personal, universal and specific. It's about being young and falling in love and making exciting and terrifying discoveries and screwing it all up and having your heart broken in a country and a world that are transforming themselves with bewildering speed. It's perhaps the first great love story of the 21st century that could belong only to this century.