Blue Is The Wrongest Color

[ I generally do not write movie reviews unless a movie was so bad that I need to do something to wash the taste of it out of my mouth. Thus, Blue is the Warmest Color warranted a review.]

This movie brought to mind one of those old Alka-Seltzer commercials in which a woozy-looking guy is sitting on the edge of his bed, about to hurl, and says of his predicament, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Clocking-in at three hours, I can’t believe I watched this entire movie, in no small part to my own determination to finish something once I’ve crossed the half-way mark, which I regard as the ‘point of no return.’ This is to say I obviously hate myself because why else would I watch a movie that is one of those supposedly high-minded art pieces in which everything is supposed to a metaphor for something else? For example, the color blue is a metaphor for the things about the world that confuse the main character Adele, the gratuitous shots of Adele sleeping is a metaphor for her unconscious desire to ‘wake up,’ dinner conversation with her family a metaphor for her existential angst, even the bloody spaghetti her parents make and she later prepares for Emma’s friends is a metaphor! I don’t usually mind symbolism, but I do mind being bludgeoned to death with it. Of course, the symbolism is a pretense and is not why any of us are watching this movie. Let’s all stop pretending that we’re here for the ‘art’ and acknowledge that we’re here for lesbian ‘love’ scenes that are so graphic you know that somewhere a 13 year old teenage boy was unable to call or text his friends and tell him what he’s just discovered on [your choice of streaming video service]. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy these unnecessarily long scenes, but these scenes are the only time our heroine (?), Adele, comes alive; the character otherwise spends the entire movie being wishy-washy when she’s not staring off into space with her vacant doe eyes (which of course is also somehow metaphorical). Ultimately, the movie preys upon the viewer’s own existential angst, leaving us with no resolution to the story and unable to reach through the screen to strangle the director for making this movie twice as long as it should have been. Whatever good will French movies may have garnered from “Amelie” over a decade ago has now been completely erased, leaving us at the point where everyone remembers why we hate the French – they make movies like this.