"This movie's gay." How many times have you heard artistically lacking films described as such? I'm guilty of it. In my misspent teenage years, I don't recall another word in my vocabulary that served so frequently as the catchall descriptor for various media that I didn't like, but I'm better now. Thankfully it would appear that, outside of YouTube comments and impassioned Call of Duty multiplayer matches, the era when it was considered appropriate to use a sexual proclivity as a synonym for "bad" has largely gone the way of the dodo. It's a good thing too, because this movie's gay.

Blue is the Warmest Color is the latest from writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche. The film, adapted from the 2010 graphic novel of the same name by Julie Maroh, (and a masterpiece in its own right), centers on Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a French high school girl who just can't seem to find the right guy. A chance encounter with blue-haired Fine Arts student Emma (Léa Seydoux, best known to American audiences for her role as assassin Sabine Moreau in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) sheds a little light on Adèle's relationship issues. What follows is a complicated tale of Sapphic love, (because aren't all love stories complicated?), spanning several years and examining the myriad agonies and ecstasies that come with romantic relationships. Exarchopoulos and Seydoux explore them all in a way that's both tender and uncompromising.

The film is getting a wide release. It's earning multiple Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress awards on the festival circuit, including the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's garnering universal critical acclaim, including a glowing endorsement from Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg, who describes it as "magnificent". It's also rated NC-17. Given its subject matter and distinctly European attitude toward matters of human sexuality, there are some very explicit and highly controversial lesbian sex scenes in this film, but nothing overtly pornographic. They're far too unglamorous to be considered pornography. In real life, human coupling is a grunty, sweaty affair; seldom incorporating humpy synthesizer music, an industrial lighting rig or a seduced pizza deliveryman, and the film breaks new ground by depicting it as such. Nevertheless, the same American audiences that once happily paid for 14 solid hours of Saw films might blanch at such a frank portrayal of coitus on camera.

Some straight moviegoers may dismiss Blue is the Warmest Color because it's "gay" and therefore un-relatable. That would be a mistake. You don't have to be gay to enjoy this film any more than you have to be from Krypton to enjoy Man of Steel. This isn't a gay film; it's a film about life and the human condition featuring two main characters that happen to be gay. You may not be gay, but you're (hopefully) both alive and human, and those two factors alone provide more than enough common ground for you to relate to, appreciate and yes, even enjoy this film.

Even if you're a straight, WASP-y film critic.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, opens Friday, Dec. 13, 606 S. Fawcett Ave., Tacoma, $4.50-$9, 253.593.4474