At first glance, young Adèle is just another high-school student, attracted by literature, languages and learning. Coming from a “Bolognese sauce” family that speaks little to each other, Adèle lives, quickly realizing that she’s surviving. Because there’s something missing for Adèle, a gaping hole that she hasn’t yet been able to fill. She tries, but it’s not enough. Adèle is multiple, she “likes everything” speaks little, but she knows, despite her constant difficulty to exist.
Until the day Adele meets the other, her opposite, her difference. And everything becomes so obvious, so divine, as if what was complicated and empty a moment before had been transformed. Both are going to love each other as they would in “real life”, the kind of love we know from experience. Their love doesn’t depend on any rules, and it speaks to us throughout. This love is neither heterosexual nor lesbian, but active, alive and, above all, universal. It’s sometimes frightening, because it’s full of dreadful things that we don’t understand, or understand too well. We think that two people like that are made to love each other forever, to hold each other stronger, that this is their role and that this love must be preserved over and over again. But it can sometimes be cruel and cynical, and passionate whims too often spill over into everything else. We’re in a good position to realize this – all we have to do is look at the screen to see ourselves there, and realize that the poetry and mystery are often all too quickly lost.
Like no other, Abdellatif Kechiche captures these moments, these non-dialogues, the expression of bodies and their desire. He transposes beauty, which we discover to be incessant, and which touches us, without the rapturous comfort of certain more “standard” films. Perhaps, as we’ve heard in the media over the past few months, it takes a little sweat to create the sublime. La vie d’Adèle is more than a film, it’s a work of art. These two actresses have given their all in the effort to get closer to accuracy, which keeps coming back, nagging, and here they deliver a true artistic performance.
This film can be read in many ways, and we can take with us whatever we want to remember. La Vie d’Adèle makes us a little more familiar with life and its truths. And what if this really is cinema?
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