“Adèle Chapters 1 & 2” is the subtitle for Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a quiet reminder that this movie’s main character is a young woman and a work in progress; she doesn’t end when the film does. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is in her teens when the movie begins and her 20s by its end, a baby-faced young woman with a love of food (you can almost smell the cheap chocolate in her junk-food cache under her bed), a habit of perpetually playing with her messy topknot of hair, and a way of gazing at the world as if it’s full of possibility.
She also gazes that way at Emma (Léa Seydoux), a slightly older woman Adèle meets in a lesbian bar — and, just like that, cue the hard-breathing sex scenes that have given “Blue Is the Warmest Color” so much press. Yes, they are explicit (and beautifully filmed and lit; the women’s bodies look like sculptures), but they take up only a few minutes of this very long (three-hour) movie; one that’s ultimately less about sex than about the far trickier subject of intimacy.
It’s a film mostly made up of tight close-ups and gazes; we need to fill in the blanks between the scenes. (Long stretches of time pass, but we’re rarely told how much.) At first, Adèle and the whimsically blue-haired Emma are obsessed with each other, “breathing in each other” as one of them describes it; it is, for Adèle, the kind of first love that is all-encompassing. Later, as Adèle seems to have become the cook and assistant for Emma, passion has faded; ultimately, though Emma assures Adèle that “I have infinite tenderness for you,” Adèle walks away, alone.
Though the filmmaking is breezy and elegant (watch for touches of blue in every scene), it’s not entirely clear why “Blue Is the Warmest Color” needs to be three hours long, or why Adèle remains a bit of a blank slate throughout. Perhaps that subtitle is the key: She’s still forming, still changing, moving on to the next chapter. As a love story, “Blue” isn’t entirely satisfying; as a beginning, it intrigues.
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Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or [email protected]