Review: Love at its finest in 'Blue Is the Warmest Color'

1/11

The romantic story “Blue Is the Warmest Color” premiered at the 66th annual 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Lea Seydoux, left, and Adele Exarchopoulos plant kisses on the film’s Tunisian-French director, Abdellatif Kechiche. (Valery Hache / AFP/Getty Images )

2/11

The French film “Blue Is the Warmest Color” went home with Cannes’ highest honor -- the Palme d’Or award. And the award went not only to the movie, but to the director and main actresses, pictured. (Guillaume Horcajuelo / EPA)

3/11

The romantic drama “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is titled “La Vie d’Adele -- Chapitres 1 & 2” in French, or “The Life of Adele -- Chapters 1 & 2,” in English. Here, the film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, from left, poses with French actress Adele Exarchopoulos and French actor Jeremie Laheurte during an event for the film in Italy. ( Claudio Onorati / EPA )

4/11

In a solo Q&A session, actress Adele Exarchopoulos, right, said “Blue Is the Warmest Color” director Abdellatif Kechiche is “a genius, he’s tortured.” (Juan Carlos Hisdalgo / EPA )

5/11

Actor Jeremie Laheurte, from left, director Abdellatif Kechiche, actress Adele Exarchopoulos and actress Lea Seydoux attend the “Blue Is The Warmest Color” premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. (George Pimentel / WireImage)

6/11

Lea Seydoux, left, told an interviewer from the Daily Beast that filming “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was a “horrible” experience. Adele Exarchopoulos said “there was a kind of manipulation, which was hard to handle,” referring to director Abdellatif Kechiche and the many graphic sex scenes the pair had to act out. Both actresses said they would not work with the director again.

Then, during a news conference with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., director Kechiche fired back with a nearly 20-minute rant against the actresses, saving especially strong comments for Seydoux. (Jonathan Leibson / Getty Images for Variety)

7/11

Director Abdellatif Kechiche said the film’s shoot was originally scheduled for 2 1/2 months, but he ended up spending double that time to get the performance he wanted from Lea Seydoux, pictured. The extra time, Kechiche said, cost him more than 1.5 million euros out of pocket. He also said he gave Seydoux ample opportunity to quit, even during production. Seydoux said she didn’t let the director faze her. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

8/11

Lea Seydoux, right, comes from a privileged background with several family connections to the French film industry; two of her relatives are CEOs of major French studios. Director Abdellatif Kechiche used these facts to suggest her family motivated her to criticize him.

Then, during a news conference with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and in between tears, Seydoux said of her family: “It’s difficult for me to be here and to defend the film. And I gave so much to the film. My family never helped me. You can ask them. I feel there is something very unfair, and anyway that’s all I can say.” (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

9/11

When choosing Adele Exarchopoulos, pictured, as one of the film’s leading ladies, director Abdellatif Kechiche said his casting process was based on instinct. “When I meet actors, I need to have a sense of complicity with them,” he said, adding, “my casting process is very much based on intuition.” (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

10/11

Reflecting on her casting experience, Adele Exarchopoulos, pictured, told the New York Times: “In France, you always see the same actresses, and that’s great; they’re good in different movies as different characters. But at castings, you feel like you have no chance. [Director Abdellatif Kechiche] takes people like me and tries. It was a huge adventure, up and down, really intense.” (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

11/11

The love story “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was written, produced and directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. It was released too late in French theaters to be eligible for a 2014 foreign-language Oscar. The award-winning film arrives in American theaters Friday.

Days before the film was set to debut in American theaters, director Kechiche issued an open letter on French website Rue89, declaring actress Lea Seydoux an “arrogant, spoiled child,” who continues to chastise him with attempts to secure her rebel image and further land the covers of magazines and newspapers. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

Oct. 24, 2013 3:10 PM PT

The moral of “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is simple: Sex without love is nothing; life without love is even less.

French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche’s story of sexual awakening and real love stretches over 10 years. Loosely based on Julie Maroh’s superbly illustrated graphic novel and adapted for the screen by Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix, it traces the life cycle of a relationship beginning to end. The telling is beautiful and explicit. The truth of its emotionally raw, romantic drama is eternal and universal.

The story starts with Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a 15-year-old high school student in the midst of figuring out life. It soon intersects with Emma (Léa Seydoux), a college art student. The younger girl wants to teach kindergartners; the older is an emerging painter of some significance. Adèle’s family is working class. Emma’s the intellectual elite. They are both beautiful but in different ways — Adèle, completely unaffected; Emma, her hair streaked blue, quite aware of her effect. In matters of self, Adèle is unsure, Emma is certain.

PHOTOS: ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’: The women, the scenes, the director

It begins with a glance on a busy street. The moment quickly passes, only to be picked up again later. Although both of their stories are explored, the film is driven by Adèle’s journey. It is arguably the more difficult. It is certainly the most painful.

Kechiche, whose work has long interwoven sexuality and literature, sets the agenda in one of Adèle’s classes. The professor is dissecting “The Life of Marianne,” Pierre Marivaux’s prescient 18th-century novel on what women want. They’ve come to the part where Marianne realizes there is something missing in what she feels, an empty place. The students struggle to define exactly what that emptiness might be.

That is Adèle’s struggle as well. Pretty and popular, she is pursued by the perfect guy — confident, good-looking, smart and sensitive. Their flirtations quickly lead to sex. But the image of the blue-haired girl Adèle passed on the street lingers, invading her dreams, arousing her passions.

PHOTOS: NC-17 films: Why they got the rating

Adèle and Emma are soon together again, and much of the film will be spent on their connection both sexually and emotionally. The look and the dialogue have that rare quality of being ethereal and at the same time fully grounded. The realities of the relationship cross sexual, intellectual and social lines precisely and provocatively. But the richness of the film comes in the ordinary details that get equal focus — the way a plate of spaghetti is consumed or a stray hair brushed out of a face.

The film not only won the prized Palme d’Or for its director at Cannes this year, but in a relatively unprecedented move, the actresses won as well. They should have; both performances are exceptional.

Still, there are inherent difficulties for this much-praised film. The sex scenes are graphic, extensive and earned “Blue” an NC-17 rating. The affair is between women, but “Blue” does not play like an exploitation movie about lesbians in love. It’s an intriguing and intimate look at two people at their most elemental and vulnerable.

As unrestrained as Kechiche is in filming the love scenes, he shows a good deal of care in handling the issue of sexual orientation. It’s always there in his work, starting with his 2003 breakout, “Game of Love and Chance.” But he’s getting better at the nuances of the narrative.

PHOTOS: Celebrities by The Times

There are the expected moments — the taunts of Adèle’s classmates when they first spot Emma. More telling is Adèle’s internal conflict. She is smitten yet fearful. Unwilling to tell her parents or her friends about Emma, even as they become a couple, move in together, years pass.

That hesitance will lead to some of the film’s friction. But the distance in their ambitions, the intellectual drifting apart, is what begins the fraying. Much attention is paid to the shape of that particular pain — Adèle’s face etched by tears, eyes red, nose running, desperation palpable.

Seydoux, 28, who will be more familiar to U.S. audiences from her roles in “Inglourious Basterds” and “Midnight in Paris,” brings a sort of existential elegance to Emma. Though the character is clearly the stronger one, the tougher one, the actress allows room for softness as well.

Exarchopoulos, only 19 though she’s been acting since 2007, is remarkable to watch. She so completely embodies the essence of an unconscious and earthy beauty that it feels as if we are spying on an actual life. What we are most certainly seeing is an original talent.

The look of the film is stunning as well. As is Sofian El Fani’s cinematography. The bodies, whether in the heat of passion, the stillness of sleep or walking along the street, are shot with an eye to aesthetic perfection.

Critical raves have followed “Blue” as it has made its way around the festival circuit. Controversy too — the actresses and director have had very public disagreements on the difficulties of making the film. Whatever their divides, what we see on-screen is a near-perfect film, love at its finest and its most fraught.

‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’

MPAA rating: NC-17 for explicit sexual content.

Running time: 2 hours, 59 minutes, in French with English subtitles

Playing: At ArcLight Hollywood; Landmark Theater, West Los Angeles

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com