The three hour long drama, based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, depicts a compassionate and emotionally exhilarating relationship between two young women, Adele and Emma, played by Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux respectively, that is saturated with electrifying eroticism and fragile vulnerability, moving from intense want to helpless abandon of the heart. It is the coming-of-age story of Adele, a conformist adolescent initially, who undergoes a journey of sexual awakening through the trials of ecstasy and suffering, discovery and heartbreak. The two chapters represent Adele's transition from her state of innocence to experience. The extended, no-holds-barred, unapologetically graphic and explicit sex scenes had stirred up much controversy. Does this maddening intoxication of their primal passionate urges subsume and overwhelm the tender, blossoming love? Before pointing at sensual cataclysm, it will be prudent to say that there was always an inconspicuous disconnect between the two. They were not equals, either intellectually or on the social scale. The cultural clash is evident through the recurring motif of class. The contrasting family dinners or the instance when Emma talks about Jean-Paul Sartre being a great liberator and Adele responds by saying that Bob Marley was a prophet too. Emma's friends and her family share a condescending contempt for Adele aspiring to be a nursery teacher. With time, the dynamics of their relationship start changing. Earlier, Emma was consciously defiant, and in her rebelliousness Adele found a sympathising mentor. Later, as we move towards domesticity from the heightened passionate frenzy, Emma outgrows Adele in her careeristic ambitions of artistic pursuits while Adele outgrows Emma in emotional complexity. There lies their tragedy. The scene in which Emma confronts Adele after her brief affair with a man, is as fierce as their volcanic sexual energy.
Even before the release of the film, it ran into controversy with the lead pair dubbing the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, as "intrusive, oppressive, tyrannical". Julie Morah has complained of the film being a "prurient male fantasy rather than the truth of lesbian sex." At times, the prying eyes of the camera lens and its claustrophobic proximity with the female body raise important questions. Does the heterosexual director's vision, instead of documenting erotic sensation, regress into voyeurism? The feminists have slammed the relentlessly obsessive close-ups as typifying the 'male gaze' or is the director trying to unwrap the soul through the prism of the bare body in an attempted observant study of the queer? Kechiche has used references of the male gaze through the character of the art gallery owner, who rambles about mystical female orgasm and goes on to say, "Ever since women have been shown in paintings, men try desperately to depict women as they saw them, imagined them, or wished to be their fantasy."
The first half is deeply layered which gives way to exhausting indulgences of melodrama in the second. The most remarkable feature of the film is the minimalism of background music, and the emotions displayed are largely raw and unedited, bordering on hyperrealism. The performances of both the female leads is absolutely unreal, inexplicably superlative. The film, for me, belongs to Adele Exarchopoulos. She delivers the most stunning performance of the year, with so much assuredness and control over the contrasting emotions of curious uninhibitedness and calm restraint. The film, however, does not match my expectations, only because it is somewhat undeserving to be a Palme d'Or winner.
