Review Roundup: Controversial Drama BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

The sensation of the Cannes Film Festival and the most controversial film of the year, Blue is the Warmest Color made cinema history as the first film ever awarded the Palme d'Or to both its director and its actresses. In a star-making role, Adèle Exarchopoulos is Adèle, a passionate young woman who has a yearning she doesn't quite understand until a chance encounter with the blue-haired Emma ignites a flame and brings her to life.

Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) gives a fearless performance as Emma, the older woman who excites Adèle's desire and becomes the love of her life. Abdellatif Kechiche's (The Secret of the Grain) intimate epic of tenderness and passion charts their relationship over the course of several years, from the ecstasy of a first kiss to the agony of heartbreak. Pulsing with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation, Blue is the Warmest Color is a profoundly moving hymn to both love and life. (c) IFC Films

Let's see what the critics have to say...

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker: "The French title is "La Vie d'Adèle-Chapitres 1 et 2," which is plainer and more accurate, yet more affecting, since it implies that, if life is a novel, there are more chapters in store. I hope so, not because I expect a sequel but because the end of the film makes you long for Adèle to be happy, though you fear that such a day may never dawn. And it is her tale; the affair with Emma lies at the core, but, well before they meet, we see Adèle sleeping with a boy and avidly kissing a girl, and a sad percentage of the movie is spent by Adèle on her own."

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: "The camera work is so close it feels almost subdermal, and Adèle sometimes falls into an especially French kind of erotic cliché: the feral woman-child who is all id, appetites, and Gauloises smoke. But Blue's raw portrayal of infatuation and heartbreak is both devastating and sublime. It's unforgettable."

Drew Hunt, Chicago Reader: "Seydoux and Exarchopoulos deliver worthy performances, but Kechiche mishandles his ultrawidescreen frame by shooting almost every scene in the same shallow-focus medium close-up. He deviates from this drab aesthetic in a series of fiercely graphic sex scenes, but the results aren't any better."

Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter: "Because once the two girls get into bed together, they forge a sexual bond that Kechiche captures in ways few directors have done before him, allowing their lovemaking to play out in extended takes that definitely cross the barrier between performance and the real deal. Yet, the bedroom scenes are a far cry from softcore porn or art-house exploitation: what they show -- amid various positions, moaning and exposed flesh (not to mention suggestive oyster slurping, in one playful sequence) -- is that sex and love can, in the best cases, become one and the same, uniting two people who might actually have less in common than they believe."

Guy Lodge, Time Out: "From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic in every sense of the term, its every subtle emotional turn rendered widescreen on Exarchopoulos's exquisitely expressive face. Just 19 years old, the actress effortlessly charts Adèle's growth from young adult to young woman. Typically for a Kechiche film, meanwhile, her individual journey is set within a bustling, articulate network of friends, family and food. He remains a most sociable filmmaker, which makes his new film's tingly behind-closed-doors tenderness all the more remarkable."

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: "Still, there are inherent difficulties for this much-praised film. The sex scenes are graphic, extensive and earned "Blue" an NC-17 rating. The affair is between women, but "Blue" does not play like an exploitation movie about lesbians in love. It's an intriguing and intimate look at two people at their most elemental and vulnerable."

Justin Chang, Variety: "The audience, by contrast, is spared nothing. Given the film's interest in the rhythms and nuances of human communication, the explicitness and duration of the sex scenes here should come as little surprise. Still, it's scorching, NC-17-level stuff, if it gets rated at all; the individual scenes are sustained for minutes at a time and lensed from a multitude of angles, with enough wide shots to erase any suspicion of body doubles. Trying out almost every position imaginable and blurring the line between simulated and unsimulated acts, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux are utterly fearless, conveying an almost feral hunger as their characters make love with increasing abandon. Audience titillation, though certainly there for the taking, couldn't be more beside the point; each coupling signifies a deeper level of intimacy, laying an emotional foundation that pays off to shattering effect in the film's third hour."

Jon Frosch, The Atlantic: "But though it instantly joins works like Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain on the too-short list of great big-screen same-sex romances, the movie adds up to much more than a lesbian love story; by the time it reaches its quietly devastating, though hopeful, final shot, Kechiche's film has become a map of the human soul."

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