By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Lea Seydoux).
Learn how to spell (and pronounce) the name Abdellatif Kechiche. He’s the Tunisian-born male director of “Blue Is The Warmest Color,” a masterpiece in French depicting the bittersweet power of first love. Everyone, I mean virtually everyone, will find their own intimate memories of first love being touched so seductively it will be impossible to resist.
Now playing at the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd., the film is rated NC-17 and certainly deserves it. But the entire film has been done so skillfully it would be impossible to imagine without including these passionately nude love scenes between two young women. Their emotionally naked passions created in just a few encounters generously feed the rest of this three-hour journey toward full-flowering maturity.
No, this is not just another coming-of-age story winking at the grown-ups while tugging on the heartstrings of adolescents. Nor is it a feminist empowerment story of lesbian completion.
This is the coming-of-age-story for all shades of gender, perfectly timed and perfectly told, depicting those romantic feelings first awakened in Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos, learn that name, too) rather casually by her high school classmates – then jarred into full white-knuckled awareness by the blue-haired art school student Emma (Lea Seydoux), who is a few years older.
The closing film credits indicate this epic is chapters one and two of the story, indicating there will be more chapters to come. We can only hope so.
Just briefly, we first meet fresh-faced Adele, fooling around with a boy but only because she thinks this is what girls are supposed to do with boys. Once day on the city street she sees two older girls kissing passionately and it gives her a hard kick in the heart.
On a subsequent evening she wanders (not quite by chance) into a lesbian bar not really looking for anything in particular, but catches the eye of Emma, who isn’t immediately away of Adele’s innocence.
What follows is the most delicately portrayed depiction of passionate bonding, as sweet as it is powerful, sweeping us up right along with Adele and Emma.
With such euphoric happiness must follow wrenching unhappiness, of course. Then comes the wisdom of experience when wounds heal over with a protective coating of wariness.
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