Writer/director Abdellatif Kechiche turned a lot of heads at the Cannes Film Festival when his three-hour long comic book adaptation Blue is the Warmest Color (formerly La vie d’Adèle Chapitre 1 et 2) took home the Palme d’Or, the festival’s most prestigious prize. The coming of age drama is rated NC-17 for its explicit depiction of a young woman’s sexual discovery, and that’s all anyone seems to want to talk about, so I ignored it completely when I got Abdellatif Kechiche into a room for a 1:1 interview to talk about a film I consider to be one of the best in many years.
Abdellatif Kechiche had to speak through a translator (my high school French long since faded, sadly), leading to a shorter interview than normal and a little more explication on my part to make my questions about the film 100% clear. But we were able to talk about the film’s change in title, which I apparently consider a bigger deal than Kechiche does, significant plot points that were removed from the finished film and why the film deviates dramatically from the Julie Maroh’s comic book. Although we remain vague about many of the specifics, the contrast is extremely clear so if you haven’t seen Blue is the Warmest Color yet, you may wish to consider this a Major Spoiler Warning.
CraveOnline: My first question for you is actually about the title. It has two titles, La vie d’Adèle Chapitre 1 et 2, and the other is Blue is the Warmest Color. Blue is the Warmest Color is a definitive statement, and La vie d’Adèle is more open-ended. Do you feel that this affects the way people look at the film?
Abdellatif Kechiche’s Translator: As with his other films as well, when the film travels it has different titles. The distributors know a title in French may not have the same connotations. He trusts the distributors will pick a title that will connect with local audiences, and that they know their public better. It’s to their discretion. But the film is the film.
But I find that the new title places a lot of emphasis on your selective use of the color blue within the film; obviously Léa Seydoux ‘s hair and Adèle Exarchopoulos’s dress at the end of the film. Do you have any thoughts on whether that’s highlighted more than you intended, or do you think it’s bringing out an aspect that may have been missed?
Once you enter into the film the title becomes secondary, much like paintings often bear titles, but once you start observing it the title sort of dissolves. For him it doesn’t really matter that much. It’s just a title. Taxi Driver had a different title in different countries and the film remains its own entity. So for him it’s sort of secondary.
The film changes the ending of the original story, or at least cuts it out. How important was that to you, to give it more of a hopeful – or at least less tragic – finale than the graphic novel?
It’s not that it’s about being more hopeful, the ending. But he did part from the novel’s ending because he didn’t want to see that her life would necessarily end after the ending of this love story. Actually, that would be regarding this love story as destructive. But rather, a love story – even so painful as this one – can cause a lot of pain and suffering, [but] is also an opportunity to go on with life, being a little bit more self-defined, or having gained a certain amount of life experience. So there is something constructive in that, and even positive about living through something that is maybe devastating. But life does go on, so the tragic ending just didn’t fit with that kind of reasoning.
I agree. One of the things that I liked about it was that, although this love story doesn’t feel destructive, it does feel like for this young person the most important thing in the world. And it plays in such a way that it has that heightened significance even if she doesn’t die at the end.
It’s very much that the end of this love story, or love affair, is very much like when someone goes into mourning. There’s a period of devastation and then slowly life takes on again. Hopefully the end of an important love story like that is also a way to find definition in yourself, and therefore in a sense – like the grieving that you do when someone departs – there’s something that remains, like the spirit. Something that you keep with you and that then carries you into a new place, hopefully of awareness, or takes you to the next place in your life.
