You certainly feel that possibility in the movie. (N.B.: I’m not saying it happens!) Exarchopoulos has the sort of deeply expressive vagueness that signals self-protection, suggesting that when she does emerge from her shell she’ll be as vulnerable as, well, an oyster. See Also Meet the Stars of Blue Is the Warmest Color Ah, yes, oysters. They’re a motif in Kechiche’s most heavy-handed but amusing scenes.
So Emma induces her (at dinner with Emma’s freewheeling gourmand parents) to eat one-quivering in its shell, alive as it slips down Adèle’s throat. And we’re well primed for the movie’s already-legendary set pieces, those extended (borderline hard-core) sex scenes with long takes and wide shots of the lovers as they kiss and **** and duck in and out of crevices and occasionally slap each other on their butts. The sex appears to be free-form rather than rehearsed, the director sitting back and gazing straight ahead as these women do everything physically possible to connect. That this is the Male Gaze has prompted the occasional charge of “exploitation.” It’s hard for this man to call it. He thinks he’s never seen a horizontal dance so charged with a sense of discovery. The relationship’s problem, of course, is that the lovers are unequal, that Emma has had a long line of girlfriends and is poised for success as a painter, while Adèle pursues a quiet career as a teacher of small children while cooking and keeping house.
Seydoux-who transforms to the point where you can hardly believe she played the gamine with whom Owen Wilson ends up in Midnight in Paris-makes Emma a fascinating enigma. She is, ultimately, an artist, a woman whose “blue period” might not last.