BLUE SHUTTERS, BLUE MAILBOXES, a blue bus making the rounds in the blue-collar suburbs outside Lille; blue jeans and jackets and bags that brush together as teenagers circle one another in the schoolyard, and a blue scarf that a teenage girl named Adèle wears around her neck like a talisman; blue pen nibs bluing Adèle’s fingers as she writes in her blue notebook; blue sheets and blue pillows lining a bed where Adèle makes passable sounds of pleasure in bed with her first boyfriend, Thomas, who she later breaks up with on a bright blue bench under a cherry tree in full bloom; chipped blue nails hanging off fingers decked with cheap blue rings, fingers that belong to Beatrice — the first girl Adèle kisses and the first girl who, against the hard blue stalls of a girls’ bathroom, tells Adèle that the kiss was “nothing serious, just a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing”; blue smoke and blue light mingle with blue language at a gay club, where Adèle’s best friend Valentin takes her so she can leave her blues behind. Stumbling away from Valentin and his boyfriend, Adèle preternaturally makes her way to a lesbian bar around the corner. Here, among the searching glances of older, more self-assured women, she finds her true-blue love, Emma. Emma is resplendent: a vision in a faded denim vest, haloed by a shock of punky blue hair.

In his astonishing essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William Gass claims for the color blue an erotic charge that is nothing less than the essence of life. Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or winning film from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, imagines what the world might look like if this were literally true — if blue kept time with desire. In the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), blue is an envoy of curiosity, then lust, then love, then ecstasy.

Yale graduate student Merve Emre wears blue-tinted glasses in her essay, “Feeling Blue: On Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’”. Click through to continue reading.