Blue is the Warmest Colour, a simply remarkable piece of cinema

FOLLOWERS of the festival circuit will recall this epic French love story making several headlines in 2013.

First love ... Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux in a scene from the film, Blue Is the Warmest Color. Picture: Transmission...

Blue is the Warmest Colour [R18+]

Rating: 4 stars

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret Of the Grain)

Starring:Lea Seydoux, Adele Exarchopoulos

If the hue fits, wear it

FOLLOWERS of the festival circuit will recall this epic French love story making several headlines in 2013.

A history-making triumph at Cannes — where the male director and his two female leads shared the prestigious Palme d’Or — was swiftly followed by a spectacularly spiteful fallout between the victors.

The authenticity, length and sheer necessity of the film’s three explicit lesbian sex scenes prompted the meltdown, and are still being hotly debated in France a year later.

Viewed independently of the argy-bargy surrounding it, Blue Is the Warmest Colour is simply a remarkable work of cinema.

Clocking in at an imposing three hours, the film tracks both the coming-of-age and coming-out of Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos), a sensitive young woman who falls hard for a slightly older, far wiser art student, Emma (Lea Seydoux).

While the marathon running time does pose a challenge, the end results are well worth the effort.

The film owes much to the unsettlingly intense intimacy conjured by Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, who build their characters’ complex relationship with astonishingly precise intensity.

Overall, a vivid and sobering reminder that first love is never about falling for the right or wrong person. It is whether that first love will be the making or the breaking of you.