Fatigue prohibits a structured and coherent piece. This goes nowhere and says nothing.
- Over the course of its three languid hours, Blue is the Warmest Color traces its main personage from emotional isolation to the comfort of carnality, and then back to emotional isolation. At first, Adèle finds comfort in the company of Emma, and as a result, the colour blue is associated with happiness and love – warmth, if you will. By the end, and as in most modern romances of Blue’s variety (Take This Waltz, Blue Valentine), the relationship quickly dematerializes and suddenly, blue takes on a completely different meaning; it normalizes and returns back to its usual – if arbitrary – melancholic signification. As Adèle’s materially appropriates this colour (clothes, surroundings, etc.), she becomes entrenched in this watery shade of sadness and self-pity.
- It is curious to me that Blue is the Warmest Color, in a welcomed paradigm shift from the salient politics of queer cinema, attempts – and succeeds – to interrogate the anxieties facing the homosexual on a individual level rather than attempting to politicize them. Films such asWeekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011) exist as a form of the manifesto. Forwarding the politics of homosexuality through verbal arguments is, for me, extrinsic to what should be the inherent nature of the queer cinema – to evince and naturalize homosexuality. Blue is the Warmest Color, with a few minor exceptions, avoids politics. Carnality is central to the film, and queer sex is formalized with a desirous aggression that elicits an animalistic performance that naturalizes homosexuality through this primitive act..
- These sexual acts of aggression seem to be cathartic for the homosexual in cinema. In other words, loneliness is the impetus for sexual aggression. The queer film invariably opens with a character that is lonely, distraught, closeted, and occasionally asocial. They seek an end to sexual repression. In this sense, Russell from Weekend and Adèle only differ ideologically; Russell’s inertia requires privacy, while Adèle necessitates emotional dependency.
- These feelings of isolation are perhaps the greatest visual tool at queer cinema’s disposal. Blue’s evocative sense of isolation underscores the character’s subjectivity. In fairness, we have all been in a situation where romance contours us, only for it to reaffirm its absence from our own lives. I sympathize with Adèle, but she is hardly alone in her struggle. Loneliness is ubiquitous.
