Blue Is The Warmest Color has garnered a ton of attention in the past two months for gaining the notorious NC-17 rating, the graphic sex scenes, and the harsh-talking involving the director and the actresses. It also received the Cannes Film Festival's highest award and it became the first film based on a graphic novel to receive the award. And it definitely deserves it and I will tell you why...
Without giving too much away, the film is about a 15/16 year old named Adele who is sexually unsatisfied with her life and she sees the blue-haired beauty named Emma in the streets one day. She later meets her at a bar and they start to talk about their interests and lives and they go from casual conversations to falling in love and engaging in very graphic sex and becoming life partners. I won't say anything beyond that, but if you are a fan of coming-of-age dramas such as The Spectacular Now, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or Garden State, then you will definitely enjoy this film. This film doesn't raise the bar of the genre...it created a new bar.
This film had aspects that are non-comparable with other films because no other film has ever attempted the type of emotional attachment you create with these women ever in cinema. This film makes you feel like they were your best friends and you really start to care about them more than some of the people in your normal life. You develop feelings for this film that you could only dream of developing for any other film. The film follows somewhere between 7-9 years of the girls' relationship and you see them age and mature over the years and how their relationship begins to change. The film grasps you and holds you until it is finished and you won't even realize you have been sitting in the theater for 3 hours.
That leads me to the only two real flaws this film has: the length and the sometimes overly-graphic sex scenes. The movie is 3 hours long, which wouldn't be a problem to some people if the film wasn't also subtitled. The film is fully in French so you will be reading the whole entire movie. It wasn't a problem for me, but it will be for some.
The sex scenes are extremely long and fill about 40 minutes of the 3 hours. To be fair, the sex scenes are meant to show how Adele is first experimenting with a girl and how she gets used to how to pleasure a women as their relationship gets deeper and more meaningful, but when they are in a 69 position for 3 minutes straight, I think everybody has had enough. We get the point.
But those are two very minor flaws for a film that has brought so much to cinema in general and that has been as innovative as this. This film is a must-see for any person looking for a good, heartfelt, jaw-dropping, phenomenal, and gripping experience to come to life in the past several years. I highly recommend.
Now, for comparisons to the graphic novel. While the graphic novel had a much more miserable ending and while I wish the ending would have been intact, this one worked well too. I won't detail, but if you read the graphic novel before seeing the movie, like I did, then I hope you aren't disappointed. Besides the ending and changing the main girl's name from Clementine to Adele, everything is completely unchanged. The film improves upon everything that was in the graphic novel. There was one scene I wish that they would have included as it would have given viewers who haven't read the graphic novel a clue as to why Adele isn't living with her parents after high school, but it wasn't too horrible. In the graphic novel, Emma stays at her house and after having sex, she walks into her kitchen naked and her parents catch her and kick her out for her homosexuality. It would have been extremely helpful, but oh well.
As you can tell, I absolutely adored this film. I have never seen a film quite like this and I bet you will think the same thing when you see it too. These actresses are definitely going somewhere after this film and they will be some of the most respected people in the business after this film. Nothing prepared me for how polarizing this film was going to be and I walked out fully satisfied and wanting to watch it again.