Film Carew: The Past, Blue Is The Warmest Colour

THE PAST

Asghar Farhadi's sixth film is called The Past, but it features not a single dissolve back into it. Instead, it takes place entirely in the present, with the spectre of the past felt not through flashback, but through how it haunts the unhappy characters caught in Farhadi's latest drama. Finding fame as the first Iranian to win an Oscar - for his brilliant 2011 film A Separation - Farhadi has headed to France to make his first film outside Iran, but it's a continuation of the style, symbols, themes, and moral quandaries of his impressive filmography. Divorce has long been Farhadi's favoured dramatic device, and here he employs it again: Ali Mosaffa heading back to Paris, from Tehran, to finalise a divorce with Bérénico Bejo, who wants to get married to new beau Tahar Rahim.

Leaving behind Islamic Iran for multi-cultural France, The Past's 'family unit' is particularly messy: Bejo the mother of two children, by neither Mosaffa or Rahim; the latter having his own young son. The family home is a shambles: mid-renovation, rattled by trains that go past, three kids creating chaos whilst working parents come and go (symbolically, Mosaffa's old stuff is packed in suitcases - baggage! - in a shed out the back). Bejo's eldest daughter - played savagely by Pauline Burlet - is riddled with resentments at this new domestic union, and the presence of a favoured former-father-figure serves as a catalyst to the eventual spilling of the secrets and lies at the heart of this familial unhappiness. It's a familiar dramatic device - the slow build to the great revelation - but Farhadi doesn't submit to its clichés of shock and reconciliation. Instead, when the darkest spectres of the past are brought to light, they don't bring clarity, only more confusion; just as in Fireworks Wednesday (the previous Farhadi film The Past resembles most) and About Elly, telling the truth does anything but set you free; and divining what is truth from what is lies is an impossible task.

As always, Farhadi sets that responsibility at the feet of the audience. There may not be the explicit legal framework of The Beautiful City and A Separation, but the effect is still the same: judgment left up to the viewer, the film refusing to submit to storytelling's great myth of closure. Some things in life are too complex, contradictory, and confused to be reduced to the black-and-white of regular cinematic morality; and, as all Farhadi's films do, The Past ends with so many questions unanswered, and unanswerable. The effect - both in isolation, and as continuation of a peerless body-of-work - is profound, weighty, filled with moral complexity; the latest dramatic masterwork from new-millennial cinema's greatest dramatist.

My hair is blue da ba dee da ba die.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR

“I am a woman, I tell my story,” pronounces a teenage girl, reading from La Vie de Marianne in a literature class, at the beginning of Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is The Warmest Colour. The scene - life imitating art as high-school kids talk over Marivaux - is a call-back to Kechiche's second feature, 2003's Games Of Love And Chance, and a call-out to the form that his fifth film'll take. This is La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2, two instalments in the life of its own titular heroine. “First love begins with this sincerity,” another student reads, and Stéphane Mercoyrol's teacher advises them to think of themes of predestination, and love-at-first-sight. As the life of Adèle - played, exquisitely, by teenaged Adèle Exarchopoulos - unfolds, her French Lit classes oft serve as thematic precursors, but none moreso than this opening scene. When she meets her Blue Angel, Léa Seydoux's Emma, it feels predestined; these Chapters chronicling first love with fitting fire, passion, desperation, and obsession.

In the throes of amour, our heroine crosses thresholds of sexual self-discovery, lead out of the cradle of high-school and into the complication of an adult relationship. Their union is forged as any new love is - through endless fucking - and Blue Is The Warmest Colour has earnt infamy for its long scenes of lithe flesh, young lesbian love seen from the director's 50-something male gaze. Kechiche is reflective enough to put this in the text, staging a scene in which partygoing dudes discuss men in art desperately trying to depict mystical female sexuality. But Kechiche's cinematic aesthetic, favouring long takes without score, doesn't lend itself to mysticism; the many sex scenes avoiding flights into dissolve-and-sax-solo fantasy, never removing the story from its visceral realism.

Kechiche isn't ill-suited for this story of young women in love, but an apt match for Julie Maroh's graphic-novel source-text; the filmmaker, like Marivaux, getting under his heroine's skin, capturing her anxiety, insecurity, unease, and shame. The film may be a two-person character-study, but no affair takes place in a bubble; and, like Games Of Love And Chance and The Secret Of The Grain, personal tribulations spill into a social setting. Adolescent sexual awakenings are not insulated in bedrooms, but played out on the stage of high-school, to an audience gossipy, prurient, prying. When Exarchopoulos is flirting and fooling with Jérémie Laheurte, her peers' cross-examinations have a kidding quality, when she's seen with a blue-haired dyke, the grilling is outright hostile. It's coming-of-age doubling as confused coming-out; a sexual awakening that brings with it no liberation; the clarity of fucking doing nothing to make unformed self-identity less opaque.

Like Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye, First Love, Blue Is The Warmest Colour takes a big-picture view of this definitive event, showing how its repercussions echo long after the fires of passion have been doused: the fated lovers cross paths, momentarily converge into a single union, then go off on their own. An affair may be ephemeral, but the feelings linger long after. As the drama persists, the pain of a break-up becomes a dull ache, sadness so constant a companion it becomes existential malaise. The film may be renowned for its scenes of endless fucking, but there's as much lonesome, self-loathing crying as there is pelvic grinding. It's not just about first love, but first-love-lost; its soul distilled in the silent tears that forever pool in Exarchopoulos's wide-eyed eyes.