The Blue Thesis

The title, ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ really caught my attention, more so than the synopsis of the movie. I feel it’s very creative and artistic and arouse my curiosity a lot more than the French title. The first time viewing this movie, I did not pay attention at all to the color BLUE. I figured it was just about Emma’s hair . The color motifs never entered my mind, just like the teaching scenes but now after reading so many analysis of the movie, it makes me appreciate what a masterpiece this movie truly is. 

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SOURCE

In atypical fashion, Blue Is The Warmest Colour paints a devastating, raw, uncomfortable, realistic portrait of a break-up, of how some ties can never be wholly severed, and what that does to a person’s emotional state. The break-up scene is absolutely terrifying, and terrifyingly glorious. Archopoulos and Seydoux’s acting in this scene is a step beyond phenomenal. Emma and Adèle do not stop loving each other. But they’ll never be together again. If at all possible, there’s a scene later in the film, set in a café, that’s even more heart-wrenching, an imbroglio of lust, regret, and the shattered remnants of love. These two scenes are without a doubt the most powerful in a film rife with powerful moments.

I adore the allusions to colour in this film. The first time Emma, with her blue hair, visits Adèle’s school,Adèle’s wearing a blue top. Some time after the break-up, Adèle’s still clearly overcome with a deep emptiness, and on a day trip to the beach with her young students, she asks a fellow teacher to watch her kids as she makes her way to the water. She lets her hair down, and floats in calm water so clearly blue. No matter her pain, she cannot overcome water’s only vice: gravity. She cannot escape Emma. She cannot escape the torturous warmth of the love they shared. She cannot escape blue, as it continues to douse her life with various shades of melancholy. Near the end of the film, at Emma’s prestigious gallery opening, Emma no longer has blue hair, but Adèle still can’t let go. She watches what love does when it moves on. The emotion on her face, like her dress, blue…

There’s a lot going on in Blue Is The Warmest Colour, emotionally, intellectually, philosophically. There is one line, though, that Emma somewhat begrudgingly admits to Adèle in the café scene that perfectly encapsulates how I feel about this film, how Emma feels for Adèle, Adèle for Emma:

“I have infinite tenderness for you… and will my whole life.”

Blue is indeed the warmest colour.

The sky kisses water, the sun blesses them with heat.

Hearts are broken, love remains.

It has nowhere else to go.

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Source: http://s1.zetaboards.com/L_Anon/topic/5143411/1297/

 

Colors, books and philosophy.

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The Blue color is present throughout the film. Many think it represents Emma but I think it represents Adèle. Her strenght, her comfort, her needs, her desires, etc. Throughout the film you see her finding that color in places or people, most notably Emma but also at the beginning with Beatrice.

When Emma loses her hair color she and Adèle are not at the same place that they were before, they are not communicating anymore.

 

I believe Emma’s changing hair comes back to the graphic novel but I think Kechiche used this as a theme in a broader aspec in the film, especially during the editing process.

The most noticeable example of Adèle trying to use the blue for soothing is when she dives into the ocean water and finds herself sorrounded by it.

It’s a beautiful shot but one that shows that the blue around her is not enough. She then wears the blue, to see Emma again, she is her own strenght, her own comfort, her own drive to find Emma during the café scene, who is also wearing blue for the last time, the last time she represents Adèle’s hope.

In the end scene, when Adéle goes to see Emma’s paintings, the blue has left Emma, 

it is still present on the walls but as Adèle, as her own self, owning that blue.

And then Adèle has to go because she is all that’s left for her there. That period when she wanted to find herself in someone else is gone, she is the blue now and it’s time to move on.

The books. The film talks about two books at the begining, while Adèle and Thomas are getting to know each other during their date: The Life of Marianne by Pierre Marivaux and Dangerous Liasons by Choderlos de Laclos. This is at the beginning of the film but right then and there Kechiche is explaining what the film is about.

The Life of Marianne is a story about a young woman’s process of development through a series of events, Kechiche is basically saying that this is what we’ll see here with The Life of Adèle.

From Dangerous Liasons Thomas takes an specific example of Valmont writing a letter to his love while writing on the back of a prostitute, so what we get here is an example of a character behaving in a way that his actions does not exemplify his feelings. Valmont’s reasons for sleeping with prostitutes are not that he can’t love someone, as he does eventually fall in love, his reasons are that he is a complicated individual. This is also a warning, that the characters on screen may not always do what they do because of how they feel but because of circumstances created by their own complicated beings and those things may also be self harming (Adèle’s cheating).

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This is contrasted when Emma and Adèle later discuss Sartre. Emma loves Sartre and explains to Adèle his philosophy in which being precedes essence and how every person’s existance becomes significant through their own actions. So we also get a glimpse here about who Emma is as a person. She is someone who will see Adèle by what she does, or at least by what she perceives she does.

 

Later on Emma believes Adèle has a particular talent for writing, so she believes Adèle must explore that talent, otherwise she will be unfulfilled because her actions are not reflecting the person she is and that’s truly sad in her point of view.

 

 

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And when Adèle cheats, her actions became one with her here for Emma too, Adèle became then a cheater and she will always be. one that action will always be part of her.

I don’t think Kechiche wanted to create a film to debate existentialism though, even if Adèle’s actions may be seen through that perspective (as anything else can) but I think thats the closest we get at an insight on Emma and it’s the one thing he offers to understand her character to better explain her interest in art besides the very superficial elements of the class system she lives in.

At the end, going back to what I mentioned earlier about the blue color, this film is abut Adèle’s life, a life in which elements in and out of her, her own actions, her desires, and the people who came and went contributed to a growth process that is not yet over but that has left her a different person from the one in the beginning. A person who now depends on herself to find herself.

This is why, coming back to Samir (since this board is so obsessed with him), he wasn’t even given a thought at that point.

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Whether you think Samir is an asshole or whether Kechiche added him as his proxy or whether he is supposed to be a great guy or a terrible human being, the importance of his character resides in how little he matters to Adèle at the end. Because Adèle is done finding herself in someone else.

She’s done accepting people’s interest as a way to not be alone. She’s done needing a significant other’s affection to be able to live.

Those needs led her to lose the love of her life, they aren’t worth it anymore.

Adele said in one interview that …

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