La Vie d’Adèle – Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013.
So here I am writing about the absolute enchanting and powerful French movie that I have waited so long to see for various reasons I cannot even figure out at the moment. La Vie d’Adèle, aka mainly known as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, stuns us for its true and untainted depiction of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma’s (Léa Seydoux) strikingly heartfelt love.
The director of this beautiful story is Abdellatif Kechiche, a man whose name is, probably, unpronounceable but whose talent for telling stories and intertextuality spellbinds the viewers of his movies. To name a few, he is the father of Games of Love and Chance and The Secret of The Grain, motion pictures that will grab you and wriggle your guts as only a divine entity could. Now, if his previous movies are stunningly great and catchy, La Vie d’Adèle is definitely Abdellatif’s international breakout and, on the same line, actresses Adèle and Léa’s.
The movie follows the coming of age of Adèle who is gradually experiencing both her sexuality and her passions. She is at high school when she first experiences sex with a guy, and afterwards being on a crush with a girl. Her family is the please-find-a-safe-job-otherwise-we-disinherit-you type and, as I was reading on Little White Lies, Adèle lives in an environment in which ‘appetite speaks louder than words’, nothing to be added. Of course her life will undergo a twist when blue-haired Emma, an older artist and more experienced lesbian, will conquer her heart inside out. Their love depicted on screen is simply enchanting and completely relatable, it is a naturalistic painting of humanism in which every stroke is either a stab to the heart or a caress to the cheek. I think I have never seen such acting skills in a movie and involvement in this powerful love, it is just compelling to see such talents on the screen playing with stories and giving their selves away to create a whole new dimension.
Moreover, the cinematic mastery of Kechiche makes this movie a technically lifted artwork, which, alongside with the narrative of the movie and peculiarities to convey the passing of time and the maturity of the two characters, left me mouth gaping and completely astonished, stunned. Emma’s hair become blonde, Adèle changes her hairdo and starts wearing earrings, friends do change and relationships ebb, families’s habits become their own habits while independency, but only Adèle’s cage made by denied shared love traps her until the very end of the movie, meaning after 3 hours of guts lurching ups and downs in her life. It is just wonderful.
I thank Abdellatif for the creativity and inspiration that La Vie d’Adèle ignites within me, and, above all, hope is empowered when I know that actresses like Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are out there, and I already have goose bumps envisioning them acting again on another movie set.
Cinematic Library 