Why was Emma attracted to Adele?

I think it was the fact that Adele was new to being lesbian and that she was honest at the bar.

Emma felt Adele being honest was a rare quality for some reason.

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Because Adele represented purity to Emma. She was not a "seasoned" lesbian who had been with many women: instead she was naive, innocent, shy (but with a glint in her eye that suggested there was a lot going on in her mind) and as someone else put 'demure' and a very unique type in today's extroverted/attention hungry society. Emma was probably attracted to the idea of being Adele's first. Interestingly, Adele's quite nature may have attracted Emma in the beginning but in the end it probably contributed to the demise of their relationship considering Adele never branched out artistically or expressed herself in the way Emma had encouraged her to. The lovely, luminous physical appearance of Adele would have helped entice Emma too.

Agreed. If it's true that much of this film was improvised, then it must be said that Lea Seydoux did an outstanding job as Emma in embodying the confident, seductive, counter-cultural type of young woman that people all over the world have been falling for for generations. I thought all the little flourishes that Seydoux added to Emma's "game", like the way Emma pretended to not hear Adele at the bar as an excuse to lean in closer to her, or the little wink after she kissed Adele on the cheek after their first "date", did a lot to bring the character to life and make the viewer understand why Adele was so captivated by her. Adele was also clearly very bright and intellectually curious for her age (e.g. her genuine interest in literature and cinema), and I think she was fascinated by how Emma, as an older college student, seemed cultured, mature and experienced at being with women. Emma definitely played this angle up in her pursuit of Adele.

Anyway, I'm the OP and I asked the question mostly because I was curious as to how other people read Emma's motivations in pursuing Adele. It's not hard to understand why a person would be attracted to Adele - she was sweet and it's pretty uncontested that she's smoking hot - but some viewers of the film have characterized Emma as being predatory and purposely taking advantage of Adele's youth and inexperience. I personally don't view Emma quite that unsympathetically and think that she was genuinely in love with Adele, but it has to be said that her pursuit of a high school student was a bit sketchy.

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When they were getting to know one another, conversation wise, Adele told Emma where she attended school and gave her her phone number, so one would have to assume that she went there to see Adele, because she had an attraction to her as Adele did to her. This is called getting to know one another, not necessarily stalking. When they at first passed each other on the street, Emma was walking with Sabine, with her arm around her, when she is drawn to Adele's presence; evidently, you missed the dialogue, in the earlier scene in the classroom where Adele's class and teacher are discussing relationships drawn together "through fate". Their lives were joined together through destiny;a force that neither one of them could control😁

She was looking for Emma. She'd seen her earlier and had been having sexual dreams about her. It may not be realistic that she found her but she was "looking" for her. She even said she was there to meet someone. It was sort of a magical realism moment that Adele was craning her neck in search of a fantasy and lo -- there she be.

i agree!