Kechiche: La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (Blue Is The Warmest Colour) (2013)

Based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, Abdellatif Kechiche’s fourth film revolves around the relationship between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopolous) and Emma (Lea Seydoux), two young women living in Lille, over a period of about five years. Poised somewhere between a coming-out story and a coming-of-age story, nearly all of it is shot in close-up, allowing Kechiche to recover something so naked and obscene about the face that it quickly comes to feel like a sexual organ, or even a collection of sexual organs, as Emma, who's slightly older and more experienced, teaches Adèle is that skin isn’t nearly as homogenous, uniform or undifferentiated as she previously thought. That breaks down any distinction between kissing and oral sex, making the whole film feel poised at the moment just before lips lock, or skin locks, even when Adèle and Emma are actually kissing, or having what in any other context would be considered explicit sex. In other words, and unlike so many other romantic dramas, it is erotic – and like all real eroticism, there’s something about Adèle and Emma’s romance that can never be satisfied, never be satiated, least of all by the film, which makes no effort to contain or control it. From the moment they first glimpse each other, it feels as if their relationship is somehow already over, just as it’s also destined to outlive any kind of official breakup – and in the fleeting instants when they can bear to face that fact, there’s nothing for Adèle and Emma to do but just look at each other, admit the disjunction between everything they can see and everything they could do, with that peculiarly prehensile gaze that’s so common in stories of LGBT self-discovery. And insofar as the film is about coming-out, it’s fixated with discovering how erotically charged it is just to look at someone, or something, perhaps explaining why it never really feels exploitative; Kechiche doesn’t simply want us to look at these women, he wants us to learn from them how to look at things anew, as if LGBT were a perceptual orientation as much as a sexual orientation. Certainly, as some critics have noted, it’s very long (three hours), and often shot in a fairly drab, unadorned, quotidian manner, but that just makes the breathless bits more breathless – like discovering a new colour, or even colour itself, the erotic epiphanies always take you by surprise, surpass anything you could imagine or project onto them, making for the worst kind of pornography, but the best kind of eroticism.