Blue is the Warmest Colour
on growing up and being alive
Growing up has much sleepiness in it. And long bouts of being alive. And sexually we are searching, blooding our noses, getting frustrated, experimenting our way either into paradise or purgatory. And after hitting dead ends and blind spots, there is often a time when we find sex suddenly to mean more - an emotion, an inexplicable and intricate mesh and mess. Where the bruises inside start to bleed more than the welts and bites which we get and give in pleasure. The age of confusion truly alights into our lives.
Could it be that confounding thing called love?
Our bodies demand. Our hearts explode. We see every moment pass with rare perspicacity. And when every vein of ours seems to be near bursting, we could ask for death and drift away happily. Immersion is not a choice but an inevitability. Attention is demanded. Obsession is a given. Heartbreak is round the corner.
Love has a trajectory. It flows. It moulds. Of course, it dies. But, it awakens often from it's grave as a glow. And beyond all bitterness, after having left us in its wake as a stone cast aside, it also gives our lives a meaning, which doesn't get lost, even if love does.
Blue is the Warmest Color follows love's aching arc. It revels in love's resplendent physicalities. It sees sun dappling on skin. It sees hands dipping into the innards of bodies - and finding souls. It notices life becoming philosophy, and every touch becoming a caress.
The bodies of the two lovers are like moving tapestries, the two girls are like paintings in the throes of an artist's frenzied fingers. Lovemaking becomes about finding love in each and every crook and cranny of the body. And one caresses the wonder of the other's body - and it is like an awakening. And the quiet happiness in the aftermath. And the tenderness and the intensity. Sex becomes the blood, sweat and tears of love.
But love is not only an orgasm. It is also remission. An easing out, a moving away to your side of the bed. Of finding pleasure in separateness, of seeking starkness in what's lush. And often - of finding new beds. What do we sacrifice to do so? What do we hurt, what do we gain, why do we do what we do? Is there ever a betrayal in love, or is it just stardust being showered elsewhere?
The meaning of experience often lies in the depth of the wound. And, when young, the deepest cut is when the body which they have given pleasure to belongs to a person who knows that life moves beyond the body.
And in that deep lesion lies the final lesson. Love moves on, but so does life.
Blue is the warmest colour is a blazingly gorgeous, continuously sexy and heartbreakingly real, exploration of love, its progression, and aftermath. It made waves in Cannes Film Festival, an endless controversy relating to its explicit intimacies, and a star of Lea Seydoux. Till date, it remains raw in its depiction of coming-of-age and real in its poignancy.
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When the lockdown was relaxed for the first time during Covid, Kalimpong was our first outing. Indeed it was breath of fresh air! And the vista from the Mayfair terrace are still etched in the mind.
My information sources tell me Darjeeling and Kalimpong were both part of the then kingdom of Sikkim. Until the Chogyal was persuaded by the Brits to donate those parts so that the sahibs could flee somewhere in their colony during the steaming summer months.