Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d'Adèle (Chapitres 1 et 2) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2013) the first time the jury awarded the Palme jointly to the director and to both lead actresses, an unusual triple recognition that the festival has never quite repeated. Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux subsequently spoke publicly about the production conditions on the film, criticising Kechiche's working methods; the film's standing has continued to be debated within French criticism.

Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a Lille high-school student, crosses paths in a city street with Emma (Seydoux), a blue-haired fine-arts student a few years older, and falls into a consuming first love that reshapes her sense of self, desire, work and identity. The film follows their relationship across roughly a decade (from late adolescence through Adèle's career as a primary-school teacher and Emma's emergence as a painter) with a patience and physical specificity unusual in mainstream art cinema.

Adapted from Julie Maroh's 2010 graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude, the film runs three hours and is structured around extreme close-ups of Exarchopoulos's face. The Cannes-winning juror response was that Exarchopoulos was performing a once-a-decade role; that judgment has held. The graphic nature of the central sex sequences became part of the film's reception and has continued to overshadow critical attention to the wider performance and structural achievement.