"Blue" is a Color at Most, Not the "Warmest" for Sure

Let me preface this posting with the following information about me: I love foreign films and watch them on a fairly regular basis. I particularly love French and Italian films, so it was with great eagerness that I recently went to see the 2013 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner - Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2). The Palme d'Or is the highest prize that is awarded at Cannes and some of my favorite films are Palme d'Or winners (i.e., Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Secrets & Lies, and The Pianist - just to name a few), therefore I fully expected Blue to be of that caliber.

Plot:  "Adele's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself." (imdb.com)

Review: I highly anticipated this film, mostly because of the glowing reviews by those who evaluate movies for a living. Therefore, it is sad to say that the movie itself was a big disappointment for me. It's marketed as a realistic, wrenching love story about two women; I was hopeful that such a movie would be somewhat female centric in its point of view. I was wrong. This is a movie for men by men. It is replete with beautiful young women who are (surprise surprise) extremely sexual. There are many shots of the main character's backside (in jeans, in pants, in a dress) as she walks away from the camera which feels highly objectifying and gratuitous. The sex scenes are terribly unrealistic and likely represent the director's fantasy of what a woman's sexuality is like - in addition the sex scenes are borderline softcore pornography. Now, I'm not a snob about pornography but there are places that I expect that type of film and this was not one of them. 

I will admit that the movie was well acted (very well acted, in fact), well shot, and yes - well directed. I think the editor(s) should think about another career though. Part of the art of film making is deciding how much of the footage you have shot should be included in the final film. In this case it looks like they said – "oh well we went to the bother of shooting the scene, we may as well keep it in." The story could have been told in less than 2 hours and it would have been much more satisfying and entertaining. At a whopping 3 hours, this movie is just too long and there isn't enough going on for a movie of this length. I mean - girl meets girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl loses girl, etc. etc. There were so many scenes that could have (and quite frankly, should have) been cut. I might have liked this movie better if it had been under 2 hours. 

So while this movie has been garnering rave reviews, my advice is not to waste your money or time seeing this film. While I didn't hate it, I certainly would not recommend it.

Rating:  4 out of 10 stars.