BFI LFF Review: Blue is the Warmest Colour

Screen Editor, Megan Furborough falls head over heels for Blue is the Warmest Colour.

“It’s all or nothing with you” Emma (Seydoux) laughingly tells Adèle (Exarchopoulos) at one early moment in the film. With this sentiment in mind, Kerchiche’s demanding three hour film requires your complete investment or you risk the complex beauty of this stunning film passing you by – and that’s not a chance you should take with Blue is the Warmest Colour.

One of the few non ‘widescreen close-up’ shots
Image Credit: BFI

Blue is very much the story of Adèle and Emma, and the rest of the cast, although excellent, merely circulate around this phenomenal central pairing. Adèle meets university art-student Emma when she is 17, still at school, and in the moment of flux between childhood and adulthood when everything seems both possible and futile.

This is a coming of age story, as well as a coming out story, and the audience closely follows Adèle through the beginning of their relationship, to the tentative first steps of jobs and living together, to the – perhaps inevitable – break up.

There are a lot of clashes in this film. Emma is older, a middle-class student of art history and philosophy, whose family is entirely comfortable with her sexuality. Adèle is poorer, has aspirations of becoming a teacher and has to hide her relationship after she is ridiculed and spat at when her friends find out. But the clashes are coupled with an intense focus on pleasure: art, literature, eating and, of course, sex.

With Seydoux and Exarchopoulos claiming the central ten minute sex scene took days to film with Kerchiche making them fight and hit each other again and again, it’s no wonder that these scenes have been the centre of great debate.

‘Beatifully intimate’
Image Credit: BFI

Critics have lauded them pornographic, but I would argue that the sex was dealt the same level of detail and scrutiny that every other emotion was shown in the film. These scenes show Adèle’s growth – she has gone from an awkward teenager constantly playing with her hair to a woman in full control of and enjoying her sexuality.

Blue is beautifully intimate in that it shows what isn’t beautiful. When Adèle cries snot runs down her nose and mascara streams down her face, spaghetti is noisily slurped as characters chew with open mouths and as Emma and Adèle kiss, beads of saliva hang between their lips – at times it seems to be so real that I felt like an intruder on their relationship, particularly as it is filmed almost entirely in widescreen close-ups.

During the ten years that the story takes place, Adèle’s emotional highs and lows are anchored in her expressions. They tell the audience everything there is to say about being in love by actually saying very little ,and despite the explicit sex scenes the most prominent bit of flesh on display is her heart.

Blue is the Warmest Colour is a story about love, from the thrill of first glances and first kisses to the bitterness, sadness and lingering affection that remains when that feeling dies. Like any great love story, this near-perfect film will leave a lingering stain on your heart.

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Review: Les Revenants

Les Revenants has been called the French Twin Peaks. Megan Furborough,  Screen Editor tells us what we’ve been missing.

Cast: Anne Consigny, Frédéric Pierrot, Clotilde Hesme

Image credit: Metro

2012

Channel 4

Season 1, 8 Episodes

If you didn’t watch Les Revenants (The Returned) this summer, then frankly you’ve wasted the past few months; not since Danish drama The Killing has there been a series so considered, so stylish and so gripping.

Les Revenants is an eight part French series revolving around a small town in the Alps where, seemingly inexplicably, the dead begin to return. But The Walking Dead it ain’t – this is a slow burning series which will leave you with few answers and a lot of questions.  Classic features of the zombie genre are incorporated – they’re ALWAYS hungry – but aside from a smattering of skin eating, there’s practically no blood or violence.

Atmosphere is key, and the premise works because of how it depends on extracting the tiniest, most painful emotions. Friends and families are confronted with the faces of those they’ve lost. Camille returns to find her twin sister all grown up. Simon sees his former fiancée and daughter with another man. Saying that, half the fun lies with piecing together characters and events spanning 40-odd years.

Regardless of the superbly intricate storyline, questioning how you would attempt to reconcile the dead with the living is the central theme of the series. It’s an impossible task, and for the inhabitants of Les Revenants, one that will thankfully roll into another series.

North Africa: a region on the rocks?

Arthur der Weduwen looks at the Algerian Hostage Crisis and the militant situation in North Africa and asks if the Western world needs to change its approach to this long-overlooked region.

The Algerian hostage crisis kept international news occupied for well over a week. Miscommunications, misinformation, and all-round speculation on the nature of the hostages, their captivity, and their lives were broadcast around the world. One thing that was certain was the identity of the hostage-takers, and their leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whose mission is to drive the infidels out of the North African desert.The motive of the attack was made clear by Belmokhtar: it was a just repercussion for the French invasion of Mali that had started only days earlier. This explanation was valid, but not truthful. Intelligence has now shown that the attack was well-planned, organised, and was due to take place regardless of any foreign intervention in Mali.

What does this say about the current situation in the Sahara? It is well-known that Al-Qaeda affiliated groups have been gaining ground in the North African desert. This has been a gradual trend, increasing over time as militants have been recruited and trained in Mauritania, Niger, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, and Mali. Most incidents have thus far stayed limited to the hostage-taking of European or American individuals, especially French. These have been exchanged for sums of money that have enabled the ‘freedom-fighters’ to recruit more men and acquire more weapons.

All photo credits to Calsidyrose.

What has the international response been to this threat? This is where opinions collide. Groups like the Boko Haram, operating in Nigeria, have been fighting against the Nigerian government for many years without foreign intervention. This pattern has been similarly followed in different countries. Up until this year, the Malian government was fighting the insurgents alone, and Algerian and Libyan governments have done the same for many years.

The gaze of the West is ever East, a saying that is as true today as it was a thousand years ago. The USA and its European allies have largely maintained their eyes on Iraq and Afghanistan, giving weary looks to Iran as well. Meanwhile, the insurgency in North Africa has grown, and the West has grown unaccustomed to the warfare waged in the Saharan desert heat.

This is evident in the wide international disarray that occurred during and following the hostage crisis. Algeria took immediate response. They have experienced hostage crises before, and have a strict policy. No negotiations with ‘terrorists’. This caused outrage with the governments of Britain and Japan, who felt that the Algerian approach was irresponsible and the cause of much collateral damage. I, however, am sympathetic to the Algerian approach. The West is not bothered if Algerians are taken hostage and three dozen Algerians die when the Algerian government chooses not to inform them. However, as soon as Westerners are involved, the West dictates its presence and mandatory consultancy. Regardless of whether the Algerian response was right, it seems that the West needs to reconsider its North African position.

As always, some questions need to be asked. What is going to happen to France’s invasion of Mali? At the moment of writing, French troops have taken the city of Goa and will be encroaching Timbuktu soon. It seems that the superior firepower of the European-AU force will succeed in driving out the Islamists insurgents. For now.

France has pledged to leave once they have ‘liberated’ Mali. The current Malian government does not seem strong enough to contain the insurgent threat, and there is a great possibility that there will be another uprising if the French and the AU force leave. Moreover, the displacement of the Islamist insurgency will simply cause a crisis in another unstable Saharan country – Chad, or Libya, for example. The irrelevance of the artificial borders in the desert, combined with weak governments, will only facilitate this process.

What can thus be done to prevent another crisis like the hostage situation in Algeria, or the brutal regime installed by the Islamists in the North of Mali? It is difficult to say. The Islamist challenge is rooted deep within society, and is not eliminated by a foreign invasion, perhaps even strengthened in the long term. If the West seeks to prevent future crises, they must provide a healthy degree of support to the local governments. Poverty and incompetent regimes breed support for alternative methods of government, so to strengthen the authority of the pro-Western regimes in power would be an effective method of containment. However, this has been done in the past, and has led to regimes like that of Mubarak in Egypt, which has now been overthrown in the Arab Spring.

Therefore, the West needs to ask itself whether it wants more Mubaraks to emerge, or whether they want true democracy in the Sahara – even if this leads to states with an anti-West, extreme-Islamist agenda. It is no easy dilemma.