It’s been four months since I saw Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” at Cannes — whereupon it became, as it did for an awful lot of people, my favorite film of the festival. (Steven Spielberg’s jury, of course, agreed.) The film’s been burning pretty brightly in my mind ever since, but this expertly constructed US trailer brought that much more of it flooding back. Sundance Selects are taking a smart approach here, selling the film on evocative fragments of sound and image, and allowing viewers to find its raw emotional and physicals details for themselves.
The film’s just a month away from its US release, and a little over a fortnight from its French date — a refreshing turn of events, considering how often we have to wait until the following year for international festival sensations to cross over. It’ll be interesting to see how well the film does, taking into account the restrictions of an NC-17 rating. It’s heartening to see that the marketing isn’t playing any kind of sensationalist angle: sensual and sexually explicit as the film is, it’s also as pure a love story as any we’ve seen in recent years.
Is there any possibility of Academy recognition here, given the film’s ineligibility in the Best Foreign Language Film category? I’m not overly optimistic, though if critics rally forcefully behind the remarkable Adele Exarchopoulos, I won’t rule anything out. Oscar nominations are a secondary target, however: this is a film that an entire generation could take to their hearts. Check out the trailer and tell us what you think.