![]() In the film’s early stretch, the camera dawdles in the hallways, cafeteria, and periphery of Adèle’s high school, and Kechiche exhibits, as he did in L’Esquive, his talent for capturing the exuberance and moodiness of pubescent experience. The moment Emma, entangled in a relationship with an unseen woman, decides that Adèle is hers is as transcendent in its near-imperceptibility as the transition between Adèle and Emma in love to Adèle and Emma going through the motions of their doomed relationship. ![]() Then there’s cerulean-haired Emma (Seydoux), the college girl she truly hungers for, who studies Adèle and her pilgrim’s progress toward queerhood with a curiosity and ardor that’s decisive in its coolness. There’s also the terror and ecstasy that simultaneously overwhelms the high schooler when she walks into her first lesbian bar and her pheromones lure all the wrong women. There’s the sense of awakening that alights bubble-lipped Adèle’s (Exarchopoulos) face when she kisses a girl for the first time, and the horror that brings her to tears when she comes back clamoring for more. Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that’s striking, and as the work of a great rhythm man, the film doesn’t lack for grace notes. His Palme d’Or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Color, based on Julie Maroh’s acclaimed graphic novel, is beholden to a less multi-ethnic premise, but it hums just as vibrantly in its articulation of the refulgent sense of electric connectivity that would seem to forever bind two women when they catch sight of each other while crossing a busy city street. ![]() He memorably etched a panoply of converging ethnicities in L’Esquive, a document of a moody teenage wasteland where language clanked like weaponry, and again in The Secret of the Grain, which warmly allowed us to inhabit the lives, and dinner tables, of characters whose passions are roused by familial and romantic conflicts, as well as by the food that sits heavily in their bellies. Abdellatif Kechiche is a rhythm man, building the novelistically lyrical realism of his movies with the trickiest of notes: plaintive glances, surreptitious cuts, seemingly improvised dialogue. ![]()
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