Blue Is the LukeWarmest Colour Part 1

     Here comes the latest sensation from the Festival de Cannes, a love story between two young women strung across three hours. It has the pedigree (Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian filmmaker, has carte blanche over his French productions (he is viewed as a master in France, creating works like "The Secret of the Grain," which swept the César Awards in 2008), it has two beautiful starlets (Léa Seydoux and the unconscionably gorgeous newcomer (pun intended) Adèle Exarchopoulos), yet Kechiche, for all his probing, can't get these ingredients to sizzle.

     The film concerns itself with Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a high school girl who constantly hikes up her jeans and wants to be a teacher. She has the standard fling with a patchy-facial-hair dreamboat Frenchie, but he cannot fulfill her ravenous passion for something more, leading Adèle to break it off under the canopy of a cherry tree (the best shot in the film by a country mile (pinks, oranges, and blues coalesce into a melancholy stew that suits the mood marvelously)).
     
     Then, through a fateful encounter (which is groaningly foretold by Adèle's teacher in her classroom the scene before) she spots the mysterious Emma (Seydoux). They lock eyes and it is love/lust at first sight. Once they end up meeting by chance (see a pattern here?) at a "gay bar" (Kechiche shoots it like an opium den - with a similar leering Orientalism-esque remove/voyeuristic eye for the patrons) they chat, later meet in a park, and finally, while smoking cigs and staring at the sky, begin to swap spit and Sartre/Bob Marley philosophy. What comes next (after a brief butt-watching crusade through an art  museum) is the much talked about nine minute sex scene between the two sirens.

     Until this sequence, the cinematography had consisted of prolonged, subjective close-ups of Adèle's face - a Dardennian gambit. We have been seeing Adèle's world through Adèle's eyes. When we smash cut to the sex scene, we see the two actress's asses, with their faces cut out of the frame. Whose point of view is this? Oh, right, it's Kechiche's (poorly composed--figures). Kechiche betrays his intentions here. He shoots them plainly against a white wall (shades of Terry Richardson), and just sits back (except for the occasional close-up of butt-smacking/rim job). We are not Adèle in this sequence (the only sequence not from Adèle's point of view), we are seeing this display through the gleam in a director's eye. This sequence, by consequence, feels mechanical, feigned, and sterile. This is no fault of the actresses, who give it their all.