Léa Seydoux is sitting by a window over-looking a private road in the sixteenth arrondissement, Paris. Her choppy, strawberry-blonde bob is scraped into
a topknot and her face is make-up free. In the flesh, with her womanly contours, sultry Gallic sophistication and an ever-so-slightly contemptuous look in her eyes, she seems less a great beauty than a study in God-given sensuality. But then, a moment later, her expression changes and she flashes a goofily gap-toothed grin that transforms her features completely. The effect is captivating. "She is an enormously gifted girl, enormously beautiful…" says Woody Allen, who cast the 26-year-old as a soulful ingénue opposite Owen Wilson. "Although she only had a few very brief moments in Midnight in Paris, everyone fell in love with her and kept asking me at every screening, 'Who's that girl, who's that girl?'"
'She is an enormously gifted girl, enormously beautiful'
WOODY ALLEN
Right now, however, the dauphine of French film is explaining how she came to be involved with another, equally eccentric, director in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a powerfully explicit three-hour film about a lesbian relationship that, this year, jointly won the Palme d'Or for its director, Abdellatif Kechiche, Seydoux and her on-screen partner Adèle Exarchopoulos. It opens here later this month.
Truly, Blue Is the Warmest Colour is a fearless film and the director's fascination with his young actresses is felt in every frame. His camera pores over their bodies, lingering obsessively on their mouths as they slurp, smoke, sob, snog and have sex of such graphic intimacy and duration that the question of whether lesbians can be "fulfilled" need never be asked again.
"When you sign on with Abdellatif, you have an idea of the film, but that's all," explains Seydoux conspiratorially, her voice a husk of a whisper. "We read the graphic novel [by Julie Maroh, on which the film is based]. But Abdellatif doesn't work on script. It's very unique. It's not just a film that you do. It's a life commitment. He needs to have a very big intimacy with his actors - an extreme intimacy," she says. "That's his process. To the exclusion of other life - you're totally absorbed in the world of the film."
The absorption required here was unequivocal. Cast as Emma, the older art student who embarks on a relationship with the teenage Adèle, Seydoux prepared for nearly a year before moving to Lille to mooch around the city and undertake painting classes and a strict exercise regimen for the director. The film was shot in chronological order, over five and a half months, with Kechiche making his actors improvise scenes again and again and again until he was satisfied. "Sometimes it was hundreds and hundreds of takes - we could spend one week for one scene," explains Seydoux. "It's very intense. I had to lose all fears."
"We broke the ice doing a sex scene," says her co-star Exarchopoulos of the bravura required for those scenes in which the actors were protected only by prosthetic vaginas. "Everything came naturally, we became close faster than I could imagine, like allies." Although neither actress is a lesbian, their unique experiences bound them especially close. "For the sex scenes we really had to trust each other, but it was easier because we are women so we understood each other," explains Exarchopoulos. Seydoux agrees: "Our relationship was natural - on-screen and off-screen. We were in the same car, on the same journey. We made it together."
Kechiche's directorial methods have been accused in some quarters of being exploitative. Both actresses have gone on record saying they would never work with him again, and Kechiche has responded with impassioned hurt: "The Palme d'Or was a brief moment of happiness, then I felt humiliated, disgraced," he recently told a French magazine. "I live like a curse."
Yet for all the sound and fury - and there will be more, no doubt, to come - Seydoux is adamant she went into the project with her eyes open. "The thing is, I wanted to do that film. So, even if the process was difficult, that was the process. We're talking about life, and if you want to tell something very strong, you have to suffer."
We're talking about life, and if you want to tell something very strong, you have to suffer
Thankfully, the suffering has reaped rewards. Seydoux's performance, like her co-star's, is exquisite. And while the sex is explicit, the film has as much to say about class and social tension as it does about sapphic passion. "What I like about the film, and what I found extraordinary, was that it was a very simple story," explains Seydoux. "One camera, two people: it's a very average story, about love, and the end of that love, and the sadness and truth about it."
Seydoux's career has long been cleverly tempered, mixing choice independent roles with more commercial blockbusters. She is also one of those rare actresses who has made successes on both sides of the Atlantic (she will star in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel next year), but Blue Is the Warmest Colour will broaden the stage on which she will work. Refreshingly, she's a big fan of Hollywood: "In America, they are very respectful of your work," she says. "People are not judgemental. They like difference - to be different is a force. In France, you have to be like the girl next door. Show that you are humble, that you're not a star, that you keep a low profile. Even in fashion - girls don't wear make-up."
Despite today's bare face, Seydoux does wear make-up. And a body like that is hard to make low profile. Seydoux has very particular tastes, both on set - "I love to find how the character is dressed" - and off. "I'm surrounded by people who have very strong taste," she explains. "I don't care if it's good. It's all about personality. I like certain things that I know other people will not like, but I don't care," she smiles. Clothes shopping is a particular weakness, though she's cautious of following fashion too carefully. "I like things to be a bit…" she reaches for the word, "décalé [off-beat]. I might wear the wrong shoes. Or sweater. But I wear exactly what I like."
Today, she is wearing a more masculin/féminin uniform of a Rag & Bone pullover, scarf, patent black brogues, herringbone trousers and a mannish overcoat from Prada that appeal to her current love of all things Nineties. Such modish androgyny is a possible hangover from Blue Is the Warmest Colour, set during that decade, but she has long shed the indigo-coloured rinse which saw the local kids taunting her for being a Smurf. "I was very happy to lose the blue hair," she laughs. "The dye would run down my face so every night I had a blue face."
The youngest of seven, Seydoux was born in 1985 into a powerful French family (her grandfather is chairman of Pathé films, her mother Valerie Schlumberger is a former actress and her father, Henri Seydoux, founded the wireless technology business Parrot) and grew up between France and Senegal. In a rambunctious family, Seydoux was "the quiet one" of her siblings (three sisters, three brothers) and loved Charlie Chaplin and fairy tales. "I found it hard to express myself in the world. I was very shy. I'm still very shy," she admits. "But also when I was a child I could get very… I had this violence…" she glowers. "I still get angry," she continues in her soft, soft voice. "But I don't break things, I'm not hysterical."
Typically of shy children, she found acting a great outlet for her emotions, having given up on her first choice of career, opera singing. "You can express yourself through acting in ways you cannot in real life," she explains. "Music was my first love, but it was difficult for me. It's something that I really love, but I didn't feel that I was so good at it. I can sing well, but I'm not a great singer. When I sing I don't feel I'm expressing all the emotions."
It's perhaps ironic that, having dealt with so much lust, passion, jealousy, betrayal, anger and sadness on screen of late, the emotion Seydoux still finds hardest to capture is happiness, or "being light" as she calls it. "I find it hard to be joyful on screen, because I'm so tense," she explains. The deficiency is something she plans to overcome with her next film, a biopic of Yves Saint Laurent (one of two films currently in production), in which she will play Loulou de la Falaise, the fashion muse once described in The New Yorker as "the quintessential Rive Gauche haute bohémienne". Loulou will be Seydoux's first attempt at playing a real-life character. "I've never played a real person, so I'm kind of scared…" She leans forward, her voice once again conspiratorial. "I don't really know her. I know she was an icône, and had a huge personality. And that she was… How would you say? Always in a very good mood."
Like it or not, it seems Seydoux's need for lightness is fast approaching, though it's clear she still cannot decide which is the greatest acting challenge, a tortured lesbian romance or a playful party girl. "Yes," she nods distractedly, before letting loose another goofy smile. "I will have to work on that."
Blue Is the Warmest Colour is released on November 22
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