Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche France 2013 179 mins Cert: 18
Starring: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos
Language: French
This year’s Palme d’Or winner is a strikingly uninhibited exploration of the messy, mesmerising and turbulent nature of love.
Director Abdellatif Kechiche has an expansive approach to storytelling, all the better to get under his characters’ skins and into their social reality. His latest spans several years in the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos). We first meet her as a school student, tentatively getting together with a male admirer but increasingly fascinated by Emma (Léa Seydoux), a woman with blue-dyed hair that she glimpses in the street. Before long they are an item, Adèle becoming the muse for Emma’s art while she pursues her own path into adulthood. The extended scenes of lesbian sex earned headlines in Cannes—and sparked critical debate over the question of Kechiche’s male take on the material—but these sequences are strikingly new in a mainstream context, not just in their uninhibited nature, but because they’re about female pleasure presented in a direct, non-mystificatory way. The film’s compelling grip is partly d own to Kechiche’s eye as a social observer, partly because of its two lead actors. Seydoux depicts Emma with genial wit and toughness, while Exarchopoulos is a revelation, offering a fearless, deeply affecting performance of remarkable intensity. The result is something rare – a film that truly catches the messy, mesmerising turbulence of life and love. - Jonathan Romney, BFI London Film Festival programme
Winner - Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival 2013
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