REVIEW - BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR

The look of love, the touch of love, the smell of love, the taste of love. It is a near-mythical love. It extends far beyond the immediate object of one's love, that person who ignites it, and receives it, in all its joy and all its hurt. It is to discover true love for the first time, and perhaps for the only time, to drain the resources of love from one's heart. A passion of inconceivable intensity, at the cost of knowing that you will never be able to feel this way again. But it is irresistible, and so we yield. We emerge from this love, smarter, stronger, much more sensible, but it is not a fair trade, it is not an exchange. We are bereft of that which consumed and defined and drove our very being while we were in its midst. It was rapture, pure rapture. Blue Is the Warmest Colour is that same rapture. The heart-stopping, breath-taking, furious euphoria of adjoining one's body to another's and both giving and accepting a most intimate and exquisite of pleasures. The acrid, violent brutality of having that seemingly indestructible bond torn apart, wrenching oneself away whether willingly or not, the sheer enormity of the pain that is inflicted, and the sound knowledge that this is a pain that will never fully subside. Even the consummate beauty of art, of painting and of literature, even of food, even of philosophy. This is a film that you don't just want to watch, you want to live it. Its most sublime moments, and its most grotesque, all of it. For Adele, in these wondrous few years, to live it is to love it, and to love is to live. The look, the touch, smell, taste of love. She lives every bit of it.