Blue is the Warmest Color

Abdellatif Kechiche's film, based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel, was the sensation of 2013's Cannes Film Festival even before it was awarded the Palme d'Or. Adèle Exarchopoulos is Adèle, a young woman whose longings and ecstasies and losses are charted across a span of several years. Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) is the older woman who excites her desire and becomes the love of her life. Kechiche's movie is, like the films of John Cassavetes, an epic of emotional transformation. Blue pulses with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation, some verbal and some physical.