Blue is the Warmest Color

Or, The Life of Adele, Chapters 1 and 2 - the French title, which far better captures the film.

Lots of details about the plot below, but they're not really spoilers in that the knowledge of them won't affect the film.  Nothing you couldn't see coming.

This is a film that I'd like to edit down myself to a more manageable two hours.  It's unnecessarily three hours long, and I know just the scenes I'd shorten.

The movie takes place over about ten years or so; it's left unclear.  Adele at 15 falls for a boy, but has eyes for a girl, Emma.  Then she and Emma finally connect, develop a relationship, move in together, grow complacent, split up, and Adele tries to cope with the loss.



I found the shifting in time jarring, but other reviewers loved it.  I kept feeling like I was missing something - like I must have drifted off.  One minute she's in high-school living with her parents, and the next, with the same hair-do that she can't leave alone, she's a teacher living with Emma in a very cool apartment that looks way too expensive for a new teacher and an artist to afford.  And the next minute, Emma has a 3-year-old with another woman.  Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I would have liked the occasional helpful heading, like, Four years later....

Adele never seems to develop a self.  She needs another person to stave off loneliness to the point that, when Emma gets busy with her art, Adele has an affair.  She's defined by her relationship and is lost without a connection.  There's one scene in which Emma encourages Adele to develop her writing in order to be happy, but Adele's happy just being with Emma.  That kind of thing.  And there are many scenes when Adele is alone, and she just stares out the window smoking.  And crying.  She likes her job, but, without Emma, she comes home to an abyss.

And I didn't care.  She isn't enough of a character on her own for me to care about her loss.  She's singularly focused on one person to the exclusion of the rest of the world.  It's a very sad film, but I didn't shed a tear.  But I also wonder if it's because of the music.  I hated the film Lost in Translation, mainly because I think Scarlett Johansson is a horrible actress - her lines are consistently flat.  But I cried at the end when a swell of music cued me.  But this film ends with Adele walking alone as an upbeat latin song brings us to the credits.  Maybe I misinterpreted the end entirely, but she looked distraught to me - still unable to get over Emma.  A guy she obviously isn't interested in goes after her, but in the wrong direction.  Another reviewer suggests it ends with the possibility of new love, but I think it ends with her unable to love someone else.  Not yet.

When Emma wants Adele to write, it's also telling in that she doesn't really acknowledge what Adele does do.  Her teaching and cooking don't seem to count in the same way.  They don't endure like art or writing might.  There's a pretension to Emma that distances her.  Her friends also go there arguing about Klimt the way art students are trained to do - at once intellectual yet vacuous.  Adele struggles with this in reverse at the beginning - wanting to discuss novels with a musical boyfriend who doesn't like books with long sentences. Adele is more authentic in her longing to talk about it all.  She has a pure desire about her books without any need to impress others. This mis-connection of passions again presents a barrier when she can't join in on the art discussions with Emma.   And Adele's love of reading seems to be forgotten in the second half.  Why didn't she pick up a book instead of staring out the window for days and years?

And some scenes go on forever!  There's Adele reading almost an entire story to her students.  The whole thing!  And there's Adele dancing while she watches Emma talk to her old girlfriend, dance, look over, dance, look over....  Scenes like this could have given the same sense of plot or character in a fraction of the time.  There are some scenes worthy of the length - dancing outside with the children, or floating in the water at the beach - scenes that quietly embody her internal turmoil.  But most needed a ruthless editing.

And then there are the sex scenes.  Uncomfortably long and pornified, they tell us little about the characters or their relationship.  There's an awful lot of bouncing and groaning, but scant gestural communication or connection between the lovers.  We don't get to see the build-up, the seduction, only a variety of positions that allow for adequate friction.  That was a shame.

But the film is captivating because of Adele's face.  She says so much with the slightest change of expression.  I was able to keep watching the entire three hours because she's a delight to watch.

For that, I'll give it a B.  

Unrestricted Love

My Afternoons with Margueritte is a lovely film about a an uneducated man and the three women in his life:  his bus-driving girlfriend, his abusive mother, and a well-read older woman - much older.  It's no Harold and Maude though.  I think it's better.

It's not at all contrived that someone who couldn't manage in school could suddenly pick up on nuances of literature and connect them to life.  I've seen struggles with literacy prevent kids from having a useful education, and it's curious that we focus so much on the written word when we're moving beyond that in real life such that people can get all their news from YouTube.  But that's not really what the film's about.

It's about love and connections and kindness unrestricted by artificial social constructs that create boundaries around who we should spend our time with.*  It's another reminder to fight the pigeonholing that sticks us in roles that just don't work for us.  But, unlike The Graduate, the characters here actually get somewhere with their personal rebellion.

It's also about education and arrogance.  Germain is well-loved because he is kind and funny and wise.  Some reviewers find his relationship with Annette, his lovely young girlfriend, unbelievable, but I think that just reveals an attitude of rigid and arrogant conformity to social expectations.  They get what they need from one another, and they clearly have a bond in the film.  In fact, it's the whole point.  Similarities in age, education, and/or aesthetics are not what really connect us - that's all just superficial crap.  We connect when we have a profound respect and admiration for another's ideas or actions.  This is different than being impressed by them, as the characters do don't anything spectacular, but how many of us do.

And it's about rising above your beginnings.  We don't need to be taught love from our parents; it's in us already if we're brave enough to share it.

Okay, it's sentimental, but it works.

A-

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*Grammar point:  This bothers me a bit.  I know it should say, "with whom we should spend our time," but that feels awkward and pretentious.  Nobody talks like that.  Personally, I think it's time written language cleans out its closet of some archaic rules that only affect marks on student essays and little else in the world.  I'm taking the first step by largely ignoring them.

Bully and Tomboy

I saw Bully as a PD activity for teachers last week.

 

Maybe I've lived too long and seen too much, but it wasn't nearly as shocking as I expected to be.  It was real, though.  I could easily identify with the targets - why they laugh when they're getting hit.  I could also identify with the parents and the pain we feel at every bit of suffering our children have to endure.  But I could also identify with the bullying children who are so desperate to fit in, they'll do anything to distance themselves from difference.  Difference actually makes them angry.  We'll do anything to keep from being at the bottom of that pecking order.  It gets easier as we get older, but, for many people, not by much.  It just gets more subtle.

Some Visually Demanding Films

I picked a bad two movies to sew curtains to.  I don't have a sewing machine, so I had to sew by hand which is slow tedious work necessitating a good movie to keep me awake.  The movies were great, but they were too visually demanding to get much done.

The Illusionist is a cartoon with almost no talking.  With a clear nod to Mon Oncle, it's a film about a man who manages on his own as a travelling magician, but ends up with a tag-along.  The one film deals with technology taking over humanity, the other with rock stars getting in the way of more traditional entertainment.  Either way, it's sometimes hard to cope with change.



The girl cleaning his room has broken shoes, so he kindly buys her a new pair.  That dynamic solidifies as she follows him on the train and expects him to pay for her ticket.  She cooks and cleans for him, and for a few other entertainers travelling in the same circles.  It's painted as a tragic, difficult existence, but she brightens it up considerably.  Unfortunately for our hero, it means taking a real job to help pay the additional expenses because he can't seem to stop buying her everything she wants.  It's a sad, funny film.

Then I watched Chaplin.  Another sad, funny film with the theme of women taking everything they can from an older man.  I remember watching Chaplin as a kid, and it was a delight to see Robert Downey Jr. do him justice.  For me, it was worth watching just for that.  And I got most of my sewing done in the horrible flashback scenes as an elderly Chaplin discusses his biography with a fictional editor.  The movie could have been so much better with a ruthless editing.

Then I watched this...