OK, so I finally got around to watching Blue is the Warmest Color after my Calc BC test, and all I can say is: I love women and I love film aesthetics. In general.
I just have to reiterate precisely how much I love colors. I mean, I love it so much when the colors of a film match with what the main characters are feelings. It’s just so aesthetic and plain COOL, why don’t all directors do this?
Anyway,
The film is slow at first, that’s for sure. I mean, Emma, the girl with the blue hair, doesn’t appear until we’re 40 minutes in the film, and then she disappears when there’s still 30 minutes left, even though she comes back here and again. And I personally really like logical films, so it was sort of annoying to me how the film short of just jumped from Adele and Emma meeting Adele’s parents to them being adults and Adele living in Emma’s house. I don’t know, it made sense after I read the IMDb page and found out about the cut scene where Adele’s parents throw her out after they find her sleeping naked with Emma, but I would have appreciated that in the final cut.
However, the film, for the use of colors and themes alone, is definitely worth watching. The themes are sort of pretty obvious: love, growth, social class, all that jazz. And I love the way the director uses the contrasts between Emma’s parents and Adele’s parents to show their different social classes. But I don’t really want to discuss that.
Instead, allow me to introduce my favorite part about film that I only recently began to notice: colors.
I was never the kind of girl to notice color, until Carol, another wonderful lesbian film, though not nearly as R-rated as this one, and all of its reds. In this film, though, it’s obviously the blues that are the most attractive (in terms of the sex scene explicitness, this film is on the same level as The Handmaiden, and that’s saying something).
For Adele, blue seems to symbolize her unexplored sexuality. Because even before she meets Emma, her sheets are blue, her bedroom walls are blue, the bench on which she breaks up with her boyfriend is blue, even the color of the nails of the first girl she kisses is blue. She’s constantly wearing blue (like in the scene when she denies she’s a lesbian), and so it honestly doesn’t seem that surprising that she would fall in love with a girl who has a headful of bright blue hair.
It also symbolized her love for Emma. One scene stuck with me for a particularly long time: the scene of Adele getting ready to go to Emma’s art show towards the end of the film, when she puts on a bright blue (reminiscent of Emma’s old hair color) dress, and before leaving to go to the gallery, checks out her butt in the mirror. It’s not a particularly emphasized scene, and it doesn’t really seem all that special because who doesn’t want to make sure they look their best even from behind when they’re going to meet an old love? But for Adele, it was almost like one final attempt to recover what she had lost. She knew, because Emma told her, that her sex with Lise was not as good as it was with her. Her body, in a way, was something that Emma still desired, even if Emma didn’t love her as a person anymore. So she put on a blue that symbolized her continuing love for Emma, and made sure she looked sexually attractive enough.
For Emma, blue seemed to symbolize herself. It was who she was when she met Adele: a girl with blue hair, who dressed in nearly all blue, who expressed herself in every medium she could find, whether that was with pen and paper or with hair dye. She was sure, confident in her sexuality, the way Adele was not. She was smart, witty, flirty, and almost everything the awkward Adele is not. In a way, she symbolized the ideal lover in Adele’s eyes in the beginning of the film.
What I think is really interesting is how Emma is rarely seen in blue once she cuts her hair and returns to her natural blond hair color. She is only seen in blue, from my memory, once after that, and it happens in the beak up scene between the two of them. Blue was who she was, a young girl in school with big dreams, and the day she and Adele broke up she made herself anew, and blue was no longer part of her new self.
Red, as a contrasting color to blue, is also utilized constantly throughout the film.
For Adele, red was for her old self, and in a way, for when she was still lost and unsure of her sexuality. She wore red on her first date with a boy she didn’t really like, when she was denying her feelings for Emma, the man she hooked up with from work wore red when she went dancing with him for the first time, when she went swimming in the ocean after she broke her own heart. It was that scene, the colors there, specifically that made me really marvel at how the colors where used in the film. Adele lay there, in the ocean water, the coloring of the water almost making her floating hair blue. Yet she is not wearing blue. She is wearing a deep maroon red swim suit. She has found who she is, but she’s lost, because she lost Emma.
A scene in particular when she is wearing a blue shirt and red pants seem to symbolize her uncertainty and hesitation. Adele is constantly wavering throughout the film, reds and blues making splashes in her wardrobe accordingly, and it is only when she has truly lost Emma that she is able to fully embrace a bold, bright, blue (IT HURTS).
For Emma, red is who she became. She evolved from blue to red, from an electric blue to a maroon red. In a way, the muting of the colors of her symbolize her loss as well. She loved Adele, and to be betrayed the way she was must have hurt, and something about that took some of the brightness from her. Emma’s red is seen once she returns to her natural blond color, in the scenes when Adele is trying to get back together with her, in her new art and in her outfit at the gallery. I find it interesting how, even back when they were only first meeting, there are hints of red in Emma’s outfits. They, to her, are not a repression the way they are to Adele. Instead, they are hints of her future self, the person she evolves to become.
Honestly, I could go on. I mean, the way the tone of the film becomes sharper and colder once they break up, the way blue is in the title (the English one, at least) but never explicitly discussed, the way art is how Emma sees the world and she transitions from using mostly blue to using red…
Stop me.
In summation,
I LOVE COLORS AND AESTHETICS!!!
Happy Monday!!
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