Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Dir. by Abdellatif Kechiche

I’m interested, primarily, in one aspect of this film. I saw Blue is the Warmest Color projected onto a large screen in a wide ratio (2.35:1). If IMDb is to be trusted, it was shot on a Canon C300, and the resulting image is uncannily detailed in that too-real-to-feel-real style of hi-def video. Because Kechiche frames nearly every shot in a tight closeup (an unusual move, generally, but especially so in this aspect ratio), and because of the film’s 179-minute run time, watching Blue is the Warmest Color in a theater means spending more than two hours looking at faces through a telescope. When my attention drifted from the content of the film, as it did fairly often, I’d distract myself by looking at Léa Seydoux’s teeth and gums or at the warts on the back of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s hand. (This is a cinephile’s prerogative. We are habitual voyeurs, and there are few opportunities in real life for this kind of intimate examination.)

After the screening, I mentioned on Twitter that Blue is the Warmest Color felt like a film that was designed to be viewed on an iPad, and someone countered that it’s not too different in that respect from The Passion of Joan of Arc or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, two other films that rely heavily on closeups. I agree with him to a certain extent, but I think Blue is the Warmest Color is an interesting test case for a directing technique that is categorically different from the work of Dreyer and Leone. I say “technique” rather than “style” or “voice” because I suspect Kechiche’s choices could be reproduced by most competent technicians to similar effects (and likely will in coming years). It could be reduced to something along the lines of: extensive use of hi-def closeups + interesting faces (casting) + duration + realistic performances = the manufacture of feeling. I can’t think of a perfect precedent for this combination.

Obviously, Blue can be distinguished from a film like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly in many, many ways but I’m most interested in its “realistic performances,” by which I mean the genuine tears, the dripping snot, the flushed skin. Watching 18-year-old Exarchopoulos exhaust herself in scene after scene, I thought of Catherine Breillat’s comment about Isabelle Huppert: “Her gift is to be involved with her character just in the time she is playing it, and without protection. Actors are well paid but it is very dangerous work.” Throughout Blue is the Warmest Color I was too conscious of the likelihood that after Kechiche said “cut,” Exarchopoulos would need an hour to regain her composure.

I was moved by Blue is the Warmest Color, as I’m often moved by coming-of-age stories, but I don’t trust my response because the film’s form is so calculated. (I don’t trust the film because of some narrative cheats, too, but they’re tangential to this discussion.) In a nutshell, I suppose I’m wondering here if it’s possible to project 60-foot, detailed images of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s emotive face for two hours and not move an audience? More to the point, I’m wondering if that technique, in and of itself, can be called directing? Yes, Kechiche made important decisions—the elliptical editing is occasionally interesting, as are some of his storytelling choices—and he was able to elicit those large emotions from Exarchopoulos, which is one of the jobs of a director. But in all of the commotion about Kechiche’s alleged exploitation of his actresses in the filming of the sex scenes, I hear a more vague and general distrust of the film’s voice—a distrust I share because I feel manipulated by a technique devoid of a guiding wit or wisdom.


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5 responses to “Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)”

  1. Darren

    Just occurred to me that Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait might be the closest precedent for Kechiche’s technique.

  2. what a lovely analysis of a technique (and it certainly is a technique) — I think you’ve hit upon something that’s really been missing in analyses of the film, although it should be noted that the C300 shoots in 1080p, not the standard 2K or 4K — so it’s really much more comparable to 16mm film than it is to “HD”, even if it clearly handles images in a very different way, which could I guess be termed as “highly defined”, for lack of a better term. anyway, it’s always lovely to see a blogger removed from acedemia touching upon the function effects of a filmic style in such a concrete — and accurate! — way, especially one that opened up a new way of considering the film that hadn’t occurred to me.

    but the end of your argument is really disappointing — it’s such a reductive view of film! the film isn’t great — it’s even often quite awful — but there’s no reason to tie that fact to ditching the style as a whole. why run aground on such a regressive and black/white view of what techniques allow for a “good film” why writing off others altogether? in many ways it’s a similar tact to knee-jerk anti-digital reactions, which at this point I think have been likely discarded.

  3. Darren

    Thanks for the comments, JDR.

    The last few sentences of my post are lazy writing, but I’m okay with that because this is a blog post rather than an essay. (Granted, that distinction probably matters more to me than to readers who stumble upon Long Pauses.) I wrote this during my lunch hour at work as a means of exorcising some lingering thoughts about the film. I’m glad to hear it provoked some thoughts for you, too.

    I didn’t mean to dismiss the technique wholesale. The last phrase refers to Kechiche, specifically. I don’t have the time–or the desire, really–to do the hard critical work of describing exactly what I mean when I say Kechiche fails to bring a “guiding wit or wisdom” to the film. It’s a benefit of being an amateur cinephile!

  4. ‘extensive use of hi-def closeups + interesting faces (casting) + duration + realistic performances = the manufacture of feeling’

    First thought: basically like Warhol, but not.

  5. Darren

    Yep. Warhol definitely came to mind. Critics will often describe a film as a “portrait” of a character. Blue fits that description better than most. It’s why I think Zidane is the best analogue. I’m not sure if I’d call that film “directed” either.