Epic in length and intimate in scale, the new film by the Tunisian-French director Kechiche collected the Palme d'Or at Cannes. In a break with tradition, the top honour was awarded jointly to Kechiche and his two leading ladies (the only women apart from Jane Campion to have won it).
The actors' inclusion was apt: a joint best-actress award would have not done them justice. The 19-year-old Exarchopoulos' brave and generous performance offers such direct access to her emotions that it is virtually impossible not to fall in love with her.
The film tracks her character, also named Adele, over half a dozen years from teenager to young woman. We meet her as a college kid for whom schoolyard gossip ranks much higher than study, even if she finds difficulty engaging with the young men who are drawn to her.
Her first glimpse of blue-haired blonde Emma, an uber-cool fine arts student several years her senior, is not exactly what the French call a coup de foudre, but Adele quickly finds herself drawn into sexual fantasies.
Emma, for her part, is hard to read: we can't tell at first whether her gaze is predatory, proprietary or protective. Their sexual relationship, when it begins, seems utterly natural, but it's hard not to shake the sense that one will emerge with deeper scars than the other.
