Blue is the Warmest Colour (La vie d'Adèle) is an evocative French romantic drama from 2013 about a young, introverted high school student named Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who is slowly drawn into a passionate love affair with Emma (Léa Seydoux), an alluring older art student.
Chancing one day to make eye contact on the street with the seductive, blue-haired Emma, Adèle is immediately smitten and begins to question her own sexuality after being so utterly transfixed by another woman. Nights later she finds herself exploring the gay Paris nightlife where she again encounters Emma at a lesbian bar, and the two quickly hatch a warm and compassionate friendship.
Despite being ostracized at school by friends and classmates for her newfound homosexuality, Adèle falls headlong into a hot-blooded affair with Emma—the film charting the course of their intense and often tumultuous relationship over time, through the gradual ebbs and flows of their courtship and eventual cohabitation.
Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this highly charged depiction of young love is thoroughly affecting and involving, delivering an honest depiction of same-sex relations that never pulls its punches or glosses over the complexities of modern relationships. It’s a lengthy, strikingly honest and altogether transfixing presentment of sexual awakening and passionate youthful entanglement.
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