Blue is the Warmest Color: Are the Sex Scenes Simulated or Not Simulated?

Find out if the sex scenes between Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos' characters were simulated or not.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 et 2 by Abdellatif Kechiche had caused a stir for its scenes showing explicit and particularly realistic sexual relations between the two main actresses in the film, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. But were these sequences simulated or not?

In 2013, at the microphone of Inrocksthe head makeup and special effects artist Pierre Olivier Persin (who recently worked on Pierre Niney's costumes in The Count of Monte Cristo), confided that the film used prosthetics for the sex scenes between the two heroines:

“Directors don't want to communicate about this kind of stuff in general, and especially in the case of Kechiche, whose cinema is based on a realistic postulate. It breaks the mystery a little.”

Comments confirmed by those concerned. Invited by The Daily Beast Speaking about the difficulty of filming at the Telluride American Festival in September 2013, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux expressed their disagreement with the methods used by Abdellatif Kechiche during the filming of the sex scenes between their two characters.

Léa Seydoux then declared:

“We used fake vaginas that were molded from our own. It was weird having a fake vagina prop sitting on top of our vagina. We spent ten days on that scene. It wasn't, 'OK, today we're shooting the sex scene!' It was ten days!”

“At the beginning of filming”added Adèle Exarchopoulos, “I didn't know (Léa) and during the first sex scene, I was a little ashamed to touch her where I thought I wanted to, because (Kechiche) hadn't told us what to do. We were free, but at the same time embarrassed because we didn't know each other that well.”

Since then, neither actress has worked with Abdellatif Kechiche. The director, whose appearances are accompanied by protest movements, is in advanced post-production for Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due, the third part of his “Mektoub” trilogy, the second part of which was only shown once at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival where it caused controversy, and the first is available in physical format and VoD.