Review of Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) by Stefano C — 27 Oct 2017

The film has a number of flaws, most of them related to a questionable indebtedness to cinema verite and its descendants. Shots go on too long; sex scenes are prurient rather than revealing, showing no more emotional depth than a clever editor could have shown in a quarter of the time. Scenes of dialogue establish characters over and over on the same territory without deepening our understanding of them. References to literature border on the pretentious: well-read people will know why the books and writers get mentioned, but it's a little too arch for my taste to name drop Sartre in the middle of a movie, like an intellectual product-placement.

Most importantly, it dabbles in the social politics of lesbianism just enough to raise the question of whether it intends to grapple with those politics. (It doesn't, conspicuously or originally.).

Against all that must be set the lead actresses, both of whom find unexpected nuance and truth in their performances. They are not presented as "lesbian types," and this saves the film from being boringly polemical. It's primarily a love story whose protagonists happen to check the "L" box. It seems them as people with complex and interesting selves, not merely complex and interesting sexuality. This makes it worth watching.