Blue Is the Warmest Color · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch her mouth.

Adèle at her parents' table: spaghetti bolognese, eaten fast and in quantity, sauce at the corner of the lip, the fork loaded again before the last bite is down. The camera sits close enough to count the hairs that have fallen into the plate. Nothing is happening. A teenager is having dinner. Kechiche will shoot this scene again with oysters at Emma's mother's house, where seafood gets discussed as an acquired pleasure and Adèle is being examined without anyone being unkind, and he'll shoot it a third time in bed, at the same distance, with the same patience for mess. Three hours of a life, and the spine of it is a mouth taking things in.

Deleuze has a name for cinema built this way, and it isn't a compliment, which is what makes it useful: the impulse-image. In his account some films give us a recognizable social setting (he calls it the derived milieu) and then reveal it as thin skin over an originary world of drives, where people are moved by appetite rather than by motive, and where an object can carry a compulsive charge out of all proportion to its size. His examples were Stroheim and Buñuel. The originary world was a swamp, a mansion rotting from inside.

Kechiche's originary world is a state lycée in Lille. That relocation is the whole argument, and it's why the concept earns its place here instead of sitting on top of the film. Derived milieu and originary world are the same rooms at the same focal length: a classroom, a kitchen table, a nursery, a gallery. The drive underneath is hunger, and hunger here is never only for food. Adèle eats without technique and the film reads that as a mark of origin. She wants Emma with the same undefended greed. She wants the vocabulary Emma's friends have for Klimt and Schiele and cannot acquire it, and the oyster is where all of it condenses into one small object: a food you have to be taught to like.

Naturalism, for Deleuze, always runs downhill. He calls it the line of slope, and what Kechiche does with it is the film's cruelest formal decision. Julie Maroh's graphic novel killed its heroine; the film cuts the illness and substitutes attrition. Chapter one is formation, chapter two is subtraction, and between them there is no reversal, no revelation, no device. Adèle's infidelity isn't staged as a moral crisis. It's the act of someone starved of recognition, which is to say it's another meal.

None of this would hold without the face. Sofian El Fani shoots almost the entire film in close-up and medium close-up, handheld and shallow, so the world behind the face dissolves. That is Dreyer's grammar from The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the tear-tracked face is the entire dramatic space and weeping becomes the event rather than its punctuation. Deleuze splits the filmed face in two. There is the reflecting face, held still, expressing a single quality — wonder, say. And there is the intensive face, where small movements accumulate toward a threshold. Exarchopoulos is almost always the second. Watch the café breakup, filmed with exactly the proximity used for the meals: mucus, breath, a face that cannot hold itself together. The loudest thing in this film is a person failing to stop weeping.

Because the face fills the frame, geography goes. We never get a clean establishing view of the school, the apartment, the gallery. Space arrives in fragments that can't be assembled — a disconnected any-space-whatever, in Deleuze's phrase — and it keeps us pinned inside Adèle's absorbed, unreflective perception. You can't take a vantage on a room you were never shown. Then Kechiche opens up three or four times and the wides land like a blow: the demonstration coming down the boulevard, the beach, and at the end the walk away from the gallery, where distance is finally permitted and the character becomes small.

What survives the suppression of space is colour. Blue is seeded everywhere early, in hair and a bench and a bedspread and a wall, then withdrawn as Emma withdraws. This is what Deleuze means by an affective colour: a quality that absorbs the scene and its feeling rather than standing in for a meaning. Its draining is felt long before it's noticed. By the last sequence the blue is on her dress and almost nowhere else.

Kechiche's own invention is in the cutting. Cassavetes in Faces ran scenes past the written material until the social mask failed. Eustache in The Mother and the Whore let literary French run at real-time length until talk turned cruel. Pialat walked into his own dinner scene in À nos amours to knock a teenage actor off her preparation, which is the direct template for the meal-as-ambush and for directing a discovery by destabilizing her rather than rehearsing her. Kechiche takes all of that and adds the edit. His scenes are long but the cutting inside them is fast: the party keeps going, the Marivaux discussion keeps going after the point has been made, and the accumulated effect is continuous attention instead of long-take contemplation. Deleuze's temps mort, dead time, normally arrives as a held shot, a stretch where nothing advances. Here it's assembled from hundreds of short ones. The naturalism is produced, not preserved, and that changes what a director can do with duration.

The method also makes the social observation nearly invisible, which is why it lands. At the gallery party Adèle circulates with trays while the guests talk about Sartre. She is fluent, warm, well-liked, and structurally a servant. Kechiche never underlines it. He just keeps her hands busy. Deleuze would call that posture a gest: an attitude of the body that exposes a social relation the conversation is busy denying.

Which brings the hard part. The camera is felt here as a body, handheld, pinned to a nape, keeping pace rather than choosing a vantage, straight out of the Dardennes' Rosetta, with Dumont's La Vie de Jésus supplying the northern faces and the refusal of flattering light. We are always aware of a perceiver perceiving. And the film's fourth subject is looking: Emma draws Adèle, paints her, exhibits her, and by the end describes her body in the past tense. The film watches Adèle for three hours. Deleuze's naturalism has this honesty built into it, because in the impulse-image the camera is never outside the appetite it films. A shooting ratio measured in hundreds of hours is an appetite. The ratio that produced these performances is the ratio that produced the exhaustion the performers went on to describe, and the technicians' union complaint, and Maroh's objection that the intimacy of her book had been staged for someone standing outside it. Spielberg's jury gave the Palme to Kechiche, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux jointly, which was an accurate piece of criticism: the actors authored the performances and the director authored the conditions.

That unresolvedness is the film's afterlife and probably its permanent shape. It made Exarchopoulos a major actor and proved that a three-hour scoreless naturalist romance could be an international event rather than a festival curiosity. Its influence on how intimacy is filmed runs mostly by opposition — Portrait of a Lady on Fire built a model of reciprocal looking that critics read partly against this film's asymmetry — and it sits in the pre-history of the intimacy coordinator, cited more often as the argument for the job than as an example of anything.

None of that shrinks the film. It makes it a harder object: the most complete account we have of appetite as a social fact, made by a method that behaved like the thing it was filming. Watch it again for what the camera does with hunger. Then watch the blue leave the frame, one object at a time.