Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d'Adéle - 2013)

This smokin' hot (NC-17) story of a French girl discovering her lesbian sexuality has lots to recommend it but brevity is not one of its virtues. It could easily have been trimmed by an hour, even without cutting a moment of the graphic sex scenes, and would still have been over two hours in length. The two main actresses, Adéle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, are quite amazing in their intensity. Exarchopoulos (new to me) plays the lead, whose name was changed from Clementine to Adéle because the director used footage of the actress as herself in which she was called by her own name, with gusto. Seydoux (whose chameleon abilities I mentioned in Farewell My Queen) transforms herself yet again to a "tomboy"(that's what Adéle's high school classmates call her) with no makeup and blue hair. Apparently, after winning the top prize, the Palme d'Or, at Cannes earlier this year and cuddling onstage with their director/co-writer Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain) when both actresses were co-awarded the prize for the first time ever, they turned around and turned on him, saying they were exploited and bullied into making the sex scenes, and some crew members backed them up (here's more detail with no spoilers). I don't think they'll be working with him again.

Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix (has written with this director twice before and this is her fourth film editing job) adapted the screenplay from Julie Maroh's graphic novel, Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude, which literally translates to "Blue Is a Warm Color," but was translated by the publishers to Blue Is the Warmest Color, then the movie's French title means Adele's Life, once again dubbed warmest for English speakers. You can look at a few pages in English on the amazon page.

No named composer is in the end credits but I counted 23 songs today, only five of which are listed on imdb. On youtube there are a few video and music clips, including a sanitized version of the longest sex scene.

NC-17 often scares people off, not Jack and me. This is beautiful, moody, did I mention sexy? But be forewarned that it is entirely shot with handheld cameras and so induces motion picture motion sickness (MPMS), somewhat mitigated by the letterboxed subtitles but increased by the sheer length of the picture. Sit in the last row.