Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blue Is the Warmest Color
2013 · Abdellatif Kechiche · Blue Is the Warmest Color on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Adèle's mouth while she eats. (performance)
Exarchopoulos eats fast and without technique, the fork loaded again before the last bite is down, sauce at the corner of the lip. Kechiche gives meals the same closeness he gives everything else.
Payoff: Hunger is the film's basic unit, and it is never only hunger for food. In the reading: impulse-image. The reading calls this an impulse-image: people moved by appetite rather than by motive, inside ordinary rooms.
Watch how close Sofian El Fani keeps the camera to faces. (camera)
He works almost entirely in close-up and medium close-up, handheld, with a shallow field. The face fills the frame and the room behind it dissolves. The framing drifts and corrects instead of settling.
Payoff: You stay pinned inside one girl's absorbed attention, with no vantage on the world she is moving through.
Notice you never get a clean wide view of the school. (setting)
Kechiche withholds establishing shots. The lycée, the apartment, and the gallery arrive as fragments that will not assemble into a floor plan. Then three or four wides land: a boulevard, a beach, a crowd.
Payoff: You cannot take a position on a room you were never shown, so the rare distance hits like a blow. In the reading: asw-disconnection. The reading calls these disconnected spaces: fragments that never join into a place you could stand back from.
Watch for blue in the hair, a bench, a bedspread. (light)
Blue is seeded everywhere early, across objects and walls and Emma's hair. As the relationship changes, the color thins out of the frame one object at a time until almost nothing carries it.
Payoff: The color holds the feeling of the film, so its draining registers on you before you consciously notice it. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: a color that absorbs a scene's feeling instead of standing for a meaning.
Listen for what plays under the scenes: nothing. (sound)
There is no score. You get club tracks, a song on a radio, corridor chatter, cutlery, traffic, and live dialogue where lines overlap, trail off, and get stepped on.
Payoff: Refusing music is the discipline the whole method rests on, and it leaves every judgment to you.
Once you have seen it
Watch Adèle's hands at the gallery party. (staging)
She circulates with trays while the guests talk about Klimt, Schiele, and Sartre. She is fluent, warm, well-liked, and structurally a servant. Kechiche never underlines it. He simply keeps her hands busy.
Payoff: A posture exposes the class relation the conversation is busy denying, which is how the film makes its real argument.
Watch the air between the two women across the film. (staging)
Early they are staged in constant contact: legs entangled on a bench, sleeping curled together. In the late café scene they reach, touch, escalate, and a hand's width of air stays between them.
Payoff: The blocking tracks the whole relationship, and touching stops resolving anything long before either of them says so.
Track how many years pass with no marker at all. (structure)
The film gives hours to a single evening and skips whole seasons. A haircut, a job, a different apartment are the only signs. What survives the cut is sensation and humiliation, not chronology.
Payoff: The shape argues that a life is held as texture rather than as an orderly sequence of events.
Carry this in: Watch the mouth. Eating, talking, kissing, and weeping are all filmed at the same distance with the same patience.