Read Negative User Reviews for Blue Is the Warmest Color

2

LynFeb 28, 2014

A wiser, more mature movie about lesbian love & sex might have been interesting to watch. This one was so dull and aimless, I took three days to finish it up. By contrast with other coming-of-age stories, we don't really know, at the end,A wiser, more mature movie about lesbian love & sex might have been interesting to watch. This one was so dull and aimless, I took three days to finish it up. By contrast with other coming-of-age stories, we don't really know, at the end, whether Adele has learned anything significant about life, love or herself, aside from the facts that (a) she reallyreally likes lesbian sex and despite zero experience, can jump into it like a champ; and (b) breaking up is hard to do. It's disappointing that so little actual affection seemed to develop in the sex itself, even allowing for a period of initial raucous abandon. Adele also isn't developed that much. The director obviously relished showing her not just having sex, but eating, dancing, eating, drinking, teaching, blubbering, eating ... but whether she's smart or a dolt is hard to say. Finally (nitpicking) I love the way French films often show people who look "real" -- with sketchy skin, bad teeth, horrible hair, in this case ... but these two also have such perfect, pale, toned, utterly flawless hairless bodies, it's kind of ridiculous.… Expand

6 of 8 users found this helpful62

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sevumo9Mar 16, 2016

Too long movie. Specially the porn scene that lasts more that 5 minutes. I really don't understand how a such bad movie can be rated 88% by press. Maybe I'm a bit too hard by giving a 0 to that movie, but I advise to pass over this so longToo long movie. Specially the porn scene that lasts more that 5 minutes. I really don't understand how a such bad movie can be rated 88% by press. Maybe I'm a bit too hard by giving a 0 to that movie, but I advise to pass over this so long ugly movie.… Expand

6 of 8 users found this helpful62

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TLHGDec 24, 2015

This is a movie that makes me wonder: "Why did anyone put money, time, and effort to make this movie?" Movies that make me think like this are not necessarily bad movies in terms of acting, directing etc, the way the through line unfoldsThis is a movie that makes me wonder: "Why did anyone put money, time, and effort to make this movie?" Movies that make me think like this are not necessarily bad movies in terms of acting, directing etc, the way the through line unfolds etc... Movies that make me think like this are movies that are simply unnecessary. There's nothing happening in Blue is the Warmest Color. No twist, nothing extraordinary happens, the characters live in an ordinary context, there's nothing unique about the images or the music. So why should you take a few hours of the day to watch a movie that shows life exactly as it is? This movie is almost like a reality show about that friendly lesbian couple that you know from somewhere...… Expand

5 of 7 users found this helpful52

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3

VonSeuxJan 22, 2014

BAD PORN gone glorified porn. Complete waste of three hours, the plot is non-existent. No character development or real drama. Just a girl-meets-girl history with lots of ASS showing. The only reason to watch this movie is to see the gorgeousBAD PORN gone glorified porn. Complete waste of three hours, the plot is non-existent. No character development or real drama. Just a girl-meets-girl history with lots of ASS showing. The only reason to watch this movie is to see the gorgeous Adele. But do we need to **** for three hours straight? No!… Expand

6 of 9 users found this helpful63

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IronManiacFeb 17, 2015

It's time to tell the truth: this movie is a porn for people who want to fap on two beauties who make sex. Everyone saw the movie for that. Anyone who try to deniet it is either an hypocrit or naive. Admit it: people love lesbian porn, moreIt's time to tell the truth: this movie is a porn for people who want to fap on two beauties who make sex. Everyone saw the movie for that. Anyone who try to deniet it is either an hypocrit or naive. Admit it: people love lesbian porn, more than normal porn, because it allow to see two naked beauties without see naked men.

"But hey, we live in a society who would istantly condemn porn, so we need to mask that porn as art" that's what the director thinked. That is exactly what's this movie is: porn disguised as art. You don't believe me? Read the interviews: the actress repetedly said that the director forced them to do the sex scenes very many times and every time the director acted like a perv and even take advantage of the situation to touch them.

But that's just the typical hypocrisy of french cinema: just like they have pretended to defend the tigers with the Two Brothers movie while that movie actually SUPPORT tiger's abuse by using trained tigers to shot it. In the same way, this movie pretend to be "an opera who defend and acclaim the homosexual love" while in truth it's just porn for aroused teenagers.

When I say that I watched this movie just to see the beautiful girls naked I will be accused by prissiest and conformists to be a perv or one who doesn't understand the movie, while in truth I'm only honest and I understand the movie more than them. But sincerity rarely get popularity. They prefer to play the sophisticated one and say that they love the movie because of the """"messagges"""

As another confirm, the two actress are not even actress, they are MODELS. But you can see for yourself in the movie that they are not actress, since none of them can act proberly. But no one was interested in acting or story by the way.… Expand

7 of 11 users found this helpful74

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3

mshonest65Nov 16, 2013

The 3 is for the gorgeous cinematography. The minus 7 is for the boredom of three hours of a teenage girl's confusion, naivete, tears and snot. Carry some tissues if you are in tears with a runny nose half your life. Here's the critic withThe 3 is for the gorgeous cinematography. The minus 7 is for the boredom of three hours of a teenage girl's confusion, naivete, tears and snot. Carry some tissues if you are in tears with a runny nose half your life. Here's the critic with whom I agree: Steve Persall Nov 7, 2013 "Kechiche's doting on entwined limbs, thrusting pelvises and oral stimulation, all carefully posed and continued longer than necessary to get his point across, races beyond titillation to creepy voyeurism". Tampa Bay Times. This might have been edited to an hour and a half, maintained the strong parts, and allowed the audience to leave not thinking they all needed showers (not cold, just cleansing). Another "Tree of Life" experience. Where are the "the emperor is wearing no clothes" critics? Hmmm.
.… Expand

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Dude7Mar 6, 2016

It' a boring movie. Nothing special occurs. I've watched all the film hoping at the end there would be something interesting. But no. And as the movie lasts 3 hours, you feel them.
A complete waste of time and money.

5 of 8 users found this helpful53

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2

phildogDec 28, 2013

I could not believe how disappointed I was by this movie. The acting was excellent, and were it not for the editing I would have been floored, but the horrible pacing and editing just drew me right out to the point where just pulled me rightI could not believe how disappointed I was by this movie. The acting was excellent, and were it not for the editing I would have been floored, but the horrible pacing and editing just drew me right out to the point where just pulled me right out of the movie because I was tired. Tired of pointless scenes. Tired of trying to figure out how much time had passed. Two hours in I was tired of it and bored, and this movie is three hours.

It had great acting and a potentially great story, but all that went to ruin because of it's poor construction. This movie wastes an hour and a half of your time on scenes that have no relevance to the story or just plain go on way to long. Complete waste of time.… Expand

5 of 9 users found this helpful54

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1

SleepingbeautyFeb 8, 2014

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The problem with "Blue is the Warmest Color" is not pornography, it's Dogma...or at least it's legacy.

For those who don't remember, Dogma - or Dogmé '95, if you prefer - was that style of filmmaking championed by Lars von Trier and some other Danes that made the co-opting of direct cinema for the purposes of fiction filmmaking their "revolution." It's aesthetic was amateurism, poorly lit or completely unlit scenes, handheld camera work, only incidental music. It promised to restore honesty and vitality to movies, something these filmmakers felt was lacking in mainstream Hollywood cinema of the time. Twenty years ago this may have stood for something but the fact of the matter is that Dogma's aesthetic has been completely absorbed into our visual vocabulary. Whatever strength lied in the immediacy and spontaneity of its method has become a trope, a cliched code for "reality" and "honesty" and it's proliferation is increasingly just a cover for plain awful filmmaking. Director Abdellatif Kechiche's film, "Blue is the Warmest Color," is a great example of how (since this style and its variations are so ubiquitous a distinction must be made between the aesthetic of Dogma influenced dramas and the commonly employed style of the "mockumentary" used to great effect in comedies that is basically a combination of direct cinema and cinema verite but not the subject of this critique).

Where to begin with the ineptness of this film? There's almost too much to talk about. Lets just look at one of the worst scenes: Adele and Emma's first encounter.
So much has been made of the staginess of the sex scenes in this movie that no one has said anything about or even noticed the staginess of almost everything else in the movie? Nearly every beat in this film feels false and sloppily conceived. It's ironic that the very technique which is supposed to give a greater sense of reality to the picture actually exposes its fraud. Adele first sees Emma in the middle of a cross walk. Adele crosses the street one day soon after her first kiss with another girl and spots Emma, an apparently out lesbian who looks her over. Adele stops in the middle of the cross walk to blankly stare at Emma as she passes her by. Keep in mind this is a very busy crosswalk on a bustling street. Miraculously, Emma, walking with her arm around another girl gives Adele a good looking over as well in the middle of the crowded intersection. This is their first encounter. Now who stops in the middle of a busy intersection to stare at someone walking passed them? Well, possibly someone possessed by some great life forsaking impulse. And then what fortune that the person you just looked at returns your stare with her own head cocking once-over as well! Ironically, this scene is both overplayed and underplayed at the same time. Stopping dead in the middle of an intersection is the kind of big deal moment that we would expect from an brash over-the-top Hollywood movie. But this movie trades in the subtleties, the information gained by noticing the incremental changes on a person's face or in their behavior so instead of say, a set of dangerous or hilarious consequences befalling Adele as she stands there, nothing really happens at all. She just stands there staring autistically for a very, very long beat. Now I understand that she's apt to stare autistically, the movie makes a big point of it, but standing in the middle of traffic to do so is a dangerous faux pas. If we're to believe she's suddenly found herself doing such a unusually thing on account of something so remarkable as Emma's beauty this is probably the opportunity to make a point of it. But the movie just simply doesn't seem to think much of it. The scene is handled so clumsily, so awkwardly straightforward and absent of any kind of directorial insight or angle that the whole scene comes off comically unrealistic. It completely lacks any sense of Adele's emotional intuition even though we can clearly see whats going on. This is the subtle power of a director: to use a remarkable and unlikely event to show us something about a character's inner world, their desires, their realizations or their emotional progress. If it works you might accept the absurdity of the situation that brought the insight forth ; it's a kind of slight if hand, the kind this director and Dogma would surely disdain.

So what's the point of the intersection if you're not gonna do anything with it? The problem here is more than aesthetic. It's the first time the director really fails to let us into Adele's world, to help us feel what she's feeling. We merely cognate that Adele is attracted to Emma, we never feel that she is. And even then we only cognate that because we have presumed what her desires might be after being spurned by the girl she kissed earlier in the film. If it weren't for that scene we would really have no idea why Adele is staring at this girl. The Hollywood filmmaking techniques that dogma eschews can convince us all kinds of fantastic fabrications from outer space monsters to zombie time traveling monkeys. But these filmmakers struggle to make even the simplest concept ring true.

It also doesn't help that they are also some of the most egregious violators of writing's essential concepts like the rule of "show me don't tell me." These movies are so hampered by their rejection of normal story telling technique (and creativity) that they have to spend the entire time telling us what's going on. It's ironic that a filmmaking style so confident in its ability to convey the immediacy of a character's world and experience must relentlessly fall back on the dialogue to tell us what the characters are thinking, feeling, planning and doing. And in this movie, over and over again, the actors spew the same lines with the same meanings making the same points, ad naseam. Kechiche has clearly found no other way to tell us that Adele is really obsessed with Emma other than to have her repeat that sentiment endlessly. Film is a visual medium. Great films communicate visually, not with talking. But Dogma disenfranchises filmmaking of its greatest strength - the image. In its place it has attempted to revive the muscle of the writer, subtly implying that the image in its decadence has betrayed cinema's higher purpose. But writing for the screen is precisely the art of writing so that things are visually comprehensible. Every "hack" writer in Hollywood can do this but Dogma in it's mission to restore cinematic purity fails to deliver us any new useful idea. And naturally, in the absence of any good writing, the enfeebled, hackneyed image they're left with fails to deliver as well. Giant close ups of noses, eyes and mouths don't fill in the gaps of bad writing. The documentary style they employ, so often fixed on the deep close up keeps us permanently on the outside of the actor. Instead of getting closer to a character we're stuck on their face, never allowed into their interiority. There's just no lens long enough, no close up big enough to get inside a character's world. The lenses of these filmmakers desperately search the faces of their actors looking for some look, some glance, anything that could get us in there. But, alas, nothing. The shots in "Blue" run on and on pressing the limits of acting - and our patience -but there's only so much an actor can do. And these actors took it as close to the limit as we could ask but it still wasn't enough. If only the camera could burrow into the actor's faces.

Now, don't get me wrong I understand the arguments about this Dogma style defying the traditional Hollywood narrative filmmaking that compromises the truth and integrity of a character and their moment in favor of a set of suspect narrative imperatives probably meant to accomplish the normalization of traditional values and conservative ideologies. I even agree with this conceit! And I also get that with a less lavish production (or in their case, no production at all) a more disengaged (read: objective) view point should empower the audience to seek information from the actors themselves rather than getting that information shoveled to you. These are nice ideas but this solution simply does not work. The aesthetic and the meaning of this movie have no commonality. They don't work together. Here's the problem: the aesthetic is essentially a lie and the meaning of the movie remains elusive because the aesthetic actively impedes its delivery. Dogma movies and their kin have merely created a different style of **** shoveling. Only theirs is in the guise of the audience's free reflection. But we all know that these filmmakers are including and excluding as much of a story or character as any mainstream film, just as committed to the delivery of a narrative, which restricts and expands reality as much as any other style. Its just that these artists seek the imprimatur of a documented reality rather than the common fiction of popular movies (insomuch as direct cinema documentaries are guilty of the same kind of above described contrivance, the fact that they deal with actuality, not fiction deserves a forgiveness we shouldn't extend to Dogma).

"Blue is the Warmest Color's" aesthetic can basically be described as botched voyeurism. We're only allowed as much insight into the character's lives as a peeping tom could get but then once there all the things we see are at best un-informative and at worst badly blundered contrivances. At least if we're going to have the privileged view point of a spy we should see things so intimate or private they could open a character's world to us. But then again maybe that's just the fantasy of voyeurism and this movie is the reality: that spying on people probably tells us very little about other people or worse, that other people's lives are just as boring as our own. That being said I don't think any of ours lives are quite as incredible as the ones on screen in this film. Take the ridiculous break up scene where Adele simply walks out the front door after a blistering five minute fight with Emma and ends their relationship by politely closing the door behind her or the problem that we cannot tell that Adele is any more interested in Emma than anybody else she's with in the movie because nothing in her behavior or the filmmakers technique tells us either way. In fact, since we have so little idea what Adele is feeling in this movie we must simply deduce that the relationship with Emma is the important one because its the one we have to endure for three hours...
God, I sure hope it was, I'd hate to have to watch a sequel.

There are some good things in this picture...some of the acting is pretty good but the director unfortunately did nearly everything he could to get in the way of it. In that he succeeded mightily.

Finally, don't get me started on the pornography. This was not pornography. I make pornography. Pornography is beautiful, startling, dangerous, powerful, boring, arousing, open ended, liberated and enslaved all at once. These people don't know the first thing about pornography. I wouldn't disparage it that way. Only the French could make a movie about sex so unsexy. Don't believe me? Try watching French porn sometime.… Expand

5 of 14 users found this helpful59

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1

alessandrovergnJan 19, 2017

A porn disguised as a art movie, a good way to make some money...and so many intellectual critics totally fooled by it or maybe just voyeurs themselves! The original story would be interesting and the acting of the two main characters is veryA porn disguised as a art movie, a good way to make some money...and so many intellectual critics totally fooled by it or maybe just voyeurs themselves! The original story would be interesting and the acting of the two main characters is very good but... the director ruined everything by making this clearly a commercial pornographic movie, a real act of voyeurism from the first minute to the last, making it very uncomfortable to watch to normal people like me...because, dear director, not everybody is a dirty voyeur like you! I feel very sorry and embarrassed for the two actresses that had to go through the filming of this movie. But you, director, certainly had a lot of fun watching them... such a shame...… Expand

1 of 3 users found this helpful12

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PedrokelviJan 1, 2021

Film that has an appeal that is pornography level. In addition to its disgusting backstage stories

0 of 2 users found this helpful02

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1

BarbaMarcoAug 27, 2020

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. This movie is exactly what you expect from that kind of cinema that isn't good enough to elevate in the good movies ranks but doesn't want to fall into mediocrity.
It's even harder to reccomend known that it's almost 3 hours long and it contains sex scenes one of which may be defined as pedo pornography in come countries.

It narrates the story of a young lady Adele who just realize to be a lesbian. The dialogues that supposed to deliver the struggle of the girl with the prejudice of a eterosexual society, aren't that good and result to be very stereotipical. Unfortunaly it's hard to fight prejudice on lesbians when the movie itself looks like a giant stereotype.
Also generic reference to African cultures in France schools looks like very hipocritical if compared to the french position on immigrants back then (and remains still today 2020).

So why such a mediocre movie doesn't fall into mediocrity?
Because of sex scenes so extreme (and so long) to result almost pornographic. The first scene, barely 15 mins into the movie it's between a 20 yo lady and 34 yo man, with full genitalia displayed.
Than different masturbation scenes follows. The apex is reached with a 5 mins or so lesbian sex scene with both girls licking each other's vagina. In the end the sex scenes succeded in differentiate this movie from others stndards drama, but I don't think this ends up being a good thing for it… Expand

0 of 0 users found this helpful00

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