I’m usually late to the party. It was no different with the French Blue is the Warmest Color. I remember reading all the reviews and controversy, but I never got around to watching it. Subtitles mean I can’t blink. The movie, directed by Abdelatif Kechiche, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013. It is a whopping 3 hours - with at least a sixth of that is lesbian sex scenes…which made the cast and crew just as uncomfortable as the audience. After being immersed in the movie (it was 3 hours of my precious time, after all!) I found out it was based on a French graphic novel…and I knew it was calling me.
The comic: Le bleu est une couleur chaude was released in 2010 by popular Belgium publisher Glénat. It was written, drawn, inked, lettered and colored by Julie Maroh who started with the idea at 19 years old. In France, comics are the “ninth art” and you don’t “write comics” you “create albums”. This album won a ton of awards including the Audience Award at the 2011 Angoulême International Comics Festival- which boasts a bigger audience than SDCC! Canadian publisher Arsenal Pulp Press finally translated the novel last fall and released it in print and digitally (on Amazon and iTunes).
The book tells the story of a girl’s first love. Clementine is in high school and dealing with feelings that the boys she is seeing are not adequate for her. She gets infatuated by a girl-the blue haired Emma. The courtship and the girls mature and enter adulthood. What happens in the course of 160 pages feels a lot like high school and all that follows. The doubt, self loathing, trust, stealth, and discovery of finding someone on your wavelength is all portrayed universally here.
While Emma is no Ramona Flowers, her blue hair permeates throughout the book. The art is, at times, hauntingly beautiful. The comic may lack in superheroes and fight scenes, but it has a quiet humanity that all generations can relate to. The characters are believable. Maroh’s story transcends France and high school and art school. Waiting for your first crush to call-with all that excitement and the confusing sorrow if the phone doesn’t ring; that can be in any language, in any household. Maroh is working on a new album, Les corps sonores (“The Sound Bodies”) which contains a bunch of love stories focused on “alternative identities and sexual orientations”. For the creator, her mission is simple: “The best thing this book could do is help queer youth, somewhere, somehow”.
