Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Year Released: 2013
Rating: 3.5
Teenager Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) has a brief sexual relationship with a male classmate before realizing something is different about her feelings - she soon visits a lesbian bar and meets with blue-haired Emma (Lèa Seydoux), a painter, and the two begin a tempestuous affair. The controversial hardcore scenes in this - that earned it a much-deserved NC-17 - are intense but distracting and, to me, completely superfluous: in their graphic-ness, they take away from (and interrupt) what is fundamentally a powerful love story with two incredible performances and turn the movie, in those intimate segments, into pornography (the fact that the director is a male is another complicating factor). One could very easily trim out the hardcore scenes (both heterosexual and homosexual) and make a smoother film, but Kechiche (questionably) chose to keep them in there, making accusations of exploitation unavoidable (the fact that Seydoux and graphic novelist Julie Maroh came out against his treatment of the material didn't help his case much). I still believe, however, that Kechiche crafted a very good film with two commanding performances, one that's not only aware of (and shows sympathy for) the loss of one's first love but also as an exploration of class issues, with Exarchopoulos' character coming from a working class family and Seydoux's from an upper-class family (spaghetti versus oysters!) not to mention empathy for the idea of 'otherness' and the way Adèle struggles with her sexuality, bouncing back to men for meaningless flings while Emma never shies away from what she really is.
