Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Colour

June: For me it was a beautiful love story between two girls beautifully scripted and captured smoothly over four seasons. Keeping the erotica aside, the journey — especially of Adele from a high school girl to a 21-year-old, confused about her own sexuality that goes unrequited — was beautifully told. The film was three hours long without a break but at no point did I feel shifty or want to walk out.... The sexuality was like watching any other lovemaking scene that we’ve seen between a man and a woman. I was neither shocked nor outraged. It was about two girls and how they saw each other’s life, love and philosophy. And I liked the way the end was kept open.

Ushasie: It’s a very intense film about a girl and her sexuality. I don’t know if the two female protagonists are actually lovers because otherwise to portray such intense characters sometimes takes a toll on personal lives. But they portrayed the characters with a lot of care and what brilliant performances! Especially the scene where Emma asks Adele to get out of her house because she’s cheated on her. There was a seven-minute-long lovemaking scene which was brilliant. Very, very bold.... I had acted in More Than A Friend, a short film where Mallika Majumdar and I had played a lesbian couple. We had romantic scenes but nothing beyond hugging or holding hands. Such characters are difficult to play.

I have never seen a same-sex love story blossom like any other man-woman relationship tale. When I went to watch Blue is the Warmest Colour (directed by Abdellatif Kechiche) at Nandan I on Friday, I was expecting a film on lesbianism with a lot of sex scenes thrown in.

After all, the actresses — Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos — had actually accused the director of practically torturing them for weeks while shooting the love-making scenes. But I was surprised and pleasantly at that. Adele, pretty, naive and simple, was extraordinary as a young school-teacher hopelessly in love with Emma (Lea). Her coming to terms with her own sexual orientation was brilliantly portrayed. Lea as Emma was no less than perfect — strong and smart with the careless air of a painter — and when the two fall in love there’s riot on bed!

Their making out scenes, one two many, had me gape at their bodies twirling and twisting on white bed sheets. Watching Blue is the Warmest Colour is an experience that makes you wonder why films such as these will never be attempted in Tollywood in not another 20 years, maybe.

Kushali Nag

A young girl feels her first flush of love and desire, she makes love, makes promises till her fear and insecurity get the better of her and everything that she had slips away. Then begins another journey of discovering herself yet again, of what she is and what she wants.

This intense love story, heart-warming as much as it is heart-breaking is not your usual girl-meets- boy tale of falling in and out of love but about young lesbian in-your-face love, passion and despair that caused the rumble in the festival circuit.

You live and explore every moment, almost physically, with the camera as it shifts restlessly among high-school kids, rests on Adele’s sleeping lips, heaves and sighs with Emma and Adele’s tangled limbs or dwells on titillating food shots during dining table moments that define the girls’ equations with their families. [P.S: You might come out feeling very hungry for spaghetti bolognese at the end of three hours!]

Blue is the Warmest Colour is neither confusing nor overwhelmingly about what goes on in the lives of same-sex couples but a deeply engaging relationship tale that compels you to develop a kind of parallel understanding and think beyond the choices we are conditioned to make.

And then you wonder what becomes of Adele when the film closes in and the next chapter of her life begins to unfold. We’ll wait to watch...

Mohua Das