“Blue Is the Warmest Color” is not just about sapphic s.e.x. Some very potent intercourse takes place between a working-class high school student and an upper-class artist, but that is only half the story. “I actually believe that the other themes in the film, specifically the social class division — there’s a gap — are problems that are even more important in our society,” director Abdellatif Kechiche recently told Interview. Where the two lovers come from is essential to the thrust of his fifth feature. “[T]hematically, what really interested me the most was a love story between two women, or two people that came out of very different social milieus,” he said. “And to deal with the breakup, which is the result of belonging to different social milieus.”
A devoted practitioner of Renoirian realism, the filmmaker hired two actresses who shared his heroines’ socio-economic backgrounds. Léa Seydoux, granddaughter of the chairman of Pathé, “comes from an extremely wealthy, bourgeois, very comfortable milieu” and plays Emma. Relative neophyte Adèle Exarchopoulos, who “comes from something that is definitely much more modest,” plays Adèle. Kechiche admitted in The Guardian last week that he chooses working-class actresses like Exarchopoulos as a “political” move, saying “it’s a real satisfaction for me to bring them into a profession that wouldn’t have been open to them otherwise.” Though he denied a preference for either “Blue” character, Kechiche told Collider he felt an affinity for Adele in terms of “where she’s coming from in the social class – the proletarian working class that I grew up in and identify with and that she works and exists in.”
salon.com
