Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) is a French film that won the Palme d’Or. The coming-of-age romantic drama, starring Léa Seydoux as Emma and Adéle Exarchoupolos as Adéle, is based on the 2010 French graphic novel of the same name by Jul Maroh.
The story follows Adéle through her high school years into early adulthood as a teacher and her same-sex relationship with Emma (Seydoux), a painter. Throughout the film, Adéle tends to wear her light brown hair shoulder-length and dresses in working-class modern clothes. Emma is most notable for having short, dyed blue hair for most of the film.
Blue covers the entirety of Adéle and Emma’s relationship, from Adéle being bored by her first male lover and being intrigued by Emma on the street, to a gentle and searching friendship (with Emma never pressuring her), to the two getting together and Adéle experiencing a new form of freedom and identity and sexual expression in her life, to boredom and their messy end when Adéle cheats on Emma.
Their attraction to each other is both tender and deeply felt. Although there are characters that employ bi erasure against Adéle as her life goes on, it is clear that she is attracted to people of multiple genders, but only had a good working one with Emma — not that the relationships with men were invalid, they were just bad pairings. The film, however, never seems to question Adéle’s journey of self-identity. That said, for a modern film, Blue both 1) never uses the term “bi” for Adéle or another bi character and 2) runs the danger of perpetuating the stereotype that bi people are lying cheaters with Adéle’s affair with a man.
The film also garnered a lot of controversy for its main sex scenes for their length, explicitness, and authenticity (or lack thereof). It’s important to note that European filmmakers are not so puritanical about sex or sex scenes as Americans. However, the main sex scenes do suffer from the weight of the male gaze, with porn-like positions and the like that seem more likely to serve a male audience than coming across as something that was approved by an intimacy coordinator or even got consultations from someone with lived sexual experience in the queer community.
All that said, there is still much to be admired about the overall story in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It captures a lot of the hesitancy and halting moves of a first love, especially a same-sex love that is risky for someone to explore, even in modern times. And while things do not end well for our featured couple, the film has a lot to offer for those who remember that first queer love. While it is not the best entry as far as bi representation in film, overall, it has good points to offer than bad.