You certainly feel that possibility in the movie. The film is loosely based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh that takes place after Adèle (there called Clementine) has perished from - essentially - a broken heart. Every one of the couple’s interchanges is off the beat, raw, and, for Adèle, perched on the edge of an abyss - insofar as losing Emma would mean losing her sense of completeness and even reason for being. It takes considerable artistry to achieve such perfectly timed mistiming. My humanist prejudice runs toward directors who give their actors more room, but Kechiche has certainly gotten what he wanted. The Tunisian-born (male) director, Abdellatif Kechiche, has often worked with nonactors, and in interviews Exarchopoulos and Seydoux have complained that he made them do take after grueling take to get what he wanted. Adèle’s body is leading her somewhere, and she follows it into a gay bar, where she finally meets a spiky artist named Emma (Léa Seydoux) - the hoped-for bluebird of her happiness. Masturbating, Adèle can’t get anything going until a vision of Blue Hair appears between her legs - at which point it’s Magic Time. Then she passes a female couple on the street, and her eye is seized by a butch young woman with a smear of blue in her hair. A handsome boy likes her and asks her out, they fool around, etc.

Exarchopoulos plays a virginal high-school girl who’s also called Adèle ( La Vie d’Adèle is the film’s French title), and at first she appears to be on the “normal” hetero track.

In Blue, you can feel how much it costs her to put herself out there. T here’s a story that Adèle Exarchopoulos, the star of the French sexual-coming-of-age movie Blue Is the Warmest Color, was sent to acting class at the age of 8 to overcome her shyness, but the bit of it that lingers - the ghost of an instinct to hold back - might be the key to her vividness onscreen.

Blue is the warmest color love scene