In one corner, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who takes on the less popular notion that there was something predatory in the camera work of Blue is the Warmest Color. The director was a little too obsessed with the 19 year-old beauty who pleasures herself, then explodes sexually with another woman. The film is three hours long, however, and the sex, though it is the most talked about part of the film, is only a small portion of it (intense, explicit, graphic, etc). Jeff Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere believed that this opinion might have given the jury pause rewarding this film, which blew through the festival like a hurricane, and probably the only one called a “masterpiece” by critics. Many even believed that Steven Spielberg (who directed the Color Purple, for goddsakes) would not have the maturity or sensibility to allow the Palme d’or to be given to this film. Boy, were they wrong.
Dargis writes:
In this scene, as throughout, Mr. Kechiche and his hand-held camera keep close tabs on Adèle. This intimacy is clearly meant to draw you into her consciousness. Yet, as the camera hovers over her open mouth and splayed body, even while she sleeps with her derrière prettily framed, the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else.
It’s disappointing that Mr. Kechiche, whose movies include “The Secret of the Grain” and “Black Venus” (another voyeuristic exercise), seems so unaware or maybe just uninterested in the tough questions about the representation of the female body that feminists have engaged for decades. However sympathetic are the characters and Ms. Exarchopoulos, who produces prodigious amounts of tears and phlegm along with some poignant moments, Mr. Kechiche registers as oblivious to real women. He’s as bad as the male character who prattles on about “mystical” female orgasms and art without evident awareness of the barriers female artists faced or why those barriers might help explain the kind of art, including centuries of writhing female nudes, that was produced.
“Men look at women,” the art critic John Berger observed in 1972. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” Plus ça change….
Meanwhile, another prominent female critic, Stephanie Zacharek, seems to take Manohla Dargis on with her review, which specifically addresses Dargis’ complaint:
The love scenes between these two characters are beautifully staged, perhaps among the loveliest ever put on film. Sex scenes, as any director will tell you, are a nightmare to shoot: It’s extremely difficult to make good sex look good–a combination of stylized artifice and sensitivity is needed, and the perfect mix is elusive. But Kechiche (director of the 2007 critics’ favorite Secret of the Grain, as well as the much less loved 2010 Black Venus) and his actresses achieve something extraordinary: The sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color are classical without being sterile; they’re real and immediate in a way that honors the idea of terrific sex between two people who are madly in love, instead of just trying to paste a clumsy picture of it onscreen.
The picture has already drawn some criticism: There are those who believe Blue Is the Warmest Color is just an excuse for an old guy to use his camera to paw at young women’s bodies, and, accordingly, the male critics who like it simply cannot resist the allure of two hot young things in bed. Thank you, Theory of the Male Gaze, for giving us such a handy template with which to diagram the mysteries of beauty, sex, and desire!
Yet even if these sex scenes are integral to Blue Is the Warmest Color, they’re still only part of a complex whole. Kechiche and his actresses address tangled class issues, explore questions of how young people struggle to find their way in the world, and–it’s better if you know– map the contours of a romance that ends in delicate, devastating heartbreak. Seydoux, beguiling as always, is terrific as the flirtatious and self-assured Emma. But it’s Exarchopoulos, with her unmanageably lank hair and cautious smile, who sneaks off with the movie. Her Adèle is a living, breathing reminder of the romantic suffering of youth, but she’s not just about youth. Blue Is the Warmest Color is for anyone who ever fell in love only to be kicked right out of it, into a state that feels like drowning but is, in reality, just a kind of bewildered breathing. When the choice is sink or swim, most of us choose to swim. Sometimes, somehow, the movies are at one with the sea.
Dargis wasn’t the only one who felt a tad uncomfortable with the extended indulgent love scene, as discussed in this Film Comment roundtable. But by and large, theirs was the less popular opinion. The more overwhelming opinion in Cannes was that the film was true to its characters and told a story worth telling. It is easy to write it off as being interesting only to straight males who are always interested in delving into the sexuality of teenage girls. That’s a no-brainer. But there is something to be said about the human experience overall, the repression of sexuality in most Hollywood movies now, and what is, really, a vital — or maybe one of the most vital – elements of our human experience.
I am forced to sit on the sidelines and use my imagination as I have not yet seen the film. I find that my own uninformed opinion varies wildly on the subject. I go from intrigued, to appreciative, to creeped out, to protective, to annoyed…it brings up a lot of issues.
This year’s Cannes fest had one too many films about a young girl’s budding sexuality dressed up to be from her point of view but being, in the end, a film about a male viewer’s point of view. This was true about Jeune et Jolie (about a teenage prostitute who falls in love with one of her clients), The Great Beauty, and Blue is the Warmest Color. Not explored as much was adult female sexuality. There is a little of it in two films directed by women – Claire Denis’ Bastards and A Castle in Italy. Neither film was embraced, particularly, and certainly didn’t win any awards. No, it was all about the very young women and their sexually exposed bodies. Good, bad, who’s to say. That’s for you all to decide.
It is an interesting film overall, one that is leading to passionate discussions about film, sex, women, Hollywood…I suspect when I finally do see this film that I will agree with both Stephanie Zacharek and Manohla Dargis. What I hope comes of it is a freeing up of attitudes that allows for more freedom where sexuality is concerned. I hope it doesn’t always have to be focused on the very young, however. And I also hope more women storytellers get the same kind of acclaim when they delve into similar stories.
Not exactly about sexuality here, but take a look at this trailer and by no means ignore the film when it gets distribution in the US. “Elena”, a Brazilian documentary masterpiece and IMHO one of best portraits of women ever to reach the big screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPNmHTe3ShU
imagine being this squeamish about violence. we’re numb to gunplay, b
crazy to bash directors who make films about the intensely significant parts of many youths lives..
Based on Sasha elaborating on why she is uncomfortable with this movie and throwing around the ages, it seems to come from a pretty American point of view. No, I am not saying Sasha is a prude but that she seems stuck on the ages when the age of consent is lower in France (I just watched Assayas’ Apres Mai where they largely showed HS aged anarchists and artists have sex and I am pretty certain there are a few different ways such a story could not be made in the US) and what is shown in their movies in terms of sex vs. violence is vastly different than American cinema that largely constructs how comfortable American moviegoers are with sex and violence on screen.
Also for all the talk about a man directing this, I dare Kechiche to make a more uncomfortable sequence of love scenes than Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl. That was one movie where I immediately had to check the ages for the actresses at the time to not feel like I was watching ‘jail-bait’ because I never saw girls portrayed at that age that explicitly sexual- and that was heterosexual sex. That said (and I actually never liked another Breillat movie after that), it was a pretty great movie on female sexuality and on coming of age but I think it would give all of my family members strokes.
READ THIS INTERESTING PIECE:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/29/abdellatif-kechiche-s-palme-d-or-winner-blue-is-the-warmest-color-is-not-porn.html
I go from intrigued, to appreciative, to creeped out, to protective, to annoyed…it brings up a lot of issues.
That says it all, Sasha. When a film can do what you describe, either prior to seeing it or after, that’s a sign that the filmmakers have hit on something close to our own human experience that is usually seldom explored. That makes it important.
Yeah, it will spook most of the herd, but so what?
Let the sex be show on screen as the director wants. American moralists! It’s a work of art, as was Dogville, Zero Dark Thirty or Nine 1/2 Weeks.
Pete, it doesn’t take much to see that a significant percentage of the reaction to Blue (at least on Twitter) singled out the twenty minute sex scene, making much ado about it’s length and its explicitness. It’s now to the point that the scene is pretty much a synecdoche for the film (rightly or wrongly so).
Although I agree with Zacharek’s base assertion that we shouldn’t pigeonhole everything into the auspices of the Theory of Male Gaze, one cannot deny that male filmgoers/critics are a) heterosexual and b) find lesbian sex erotic. We males simply do fixate over this sort of thing in general, especially if it involves young, attractive females like Seydoux and Adele. Obviously, though, there is a discussion to be had about this.
Houstonrufus, one of the most acclaimed movies of the festival as Stranger By the Lake. They say there are a lot of penises. Erect, I mean. And explicit oral sex, ejaculations…
I think it’d help a lot if people who cover Cannes did thier homework and tried to be familiar with the directors of the movies in competition. Of course it’s about the movie and not the career, but knowing in what place that specific movie is in any certain filmography gives context to the appreciation of this movie.
From what I know about Kekiche, I just can’t imagine him being vulgar and exploitative, or filming two girls making love not to tell a story, but to satisfy his horny soul. It’s just not him.
(I do get bothered by seeing people covering Cannes and not feeling the urge to see the new Johnnie To, the new Lav Diaz, or even the new names that surge every year. Why are they there? Do they really love movies? Awards are a lot of fun, but do they justify people taking a plane to Cannes to discuss work of directors they don’t know and are not particularly interested in knowing while they wait for something Oscar to show up? Now I am not talking specifically about Sasha, or at least not only her, but I’ve read a lot of people that should have waited and saved some money to go to Toronto)
Anyway, can you all picture an artist like Lynne Ramsay liking an movie supposedly exploitative of young women, and defending it in the junket the way she did?
Sorry, pressed post too soon. Would a film about two men depicted in the same way be so well received. Granted, men probably don’t experience sexual awakening in the same way. But I still thought it’s an interesting questions. We all know the great taboo left is the erect penis.
I thought one of Mark Harris tweets on this was interesting. Would a film about two men e
Wesley Morris’ description of what it was like to hear the Palme selections and the insights to the reactions of the movie. Note he was mixed but moved by the movie. Great piece:
“Saturday night I had dinner with a handful of critics — three other Americans, two Austrians, a pair of Brits, and a Frenchman. Eventually, the subject of Adèle came up. The ardent and the annoyed proceeded to make their cases about the movie, although the skeptics were more pointed in their line of attack, which, to paraphrase, amounted to believing that the adoration of the film comes from men wanting in on the action. But the reactions weren’t neatly gendered. I met a few women who said they, too, found it beautiful and a couple of men who expressed some serious reservations. It bears mention that none of those men were French. The national trade magazine, Le Film Français, published a daily grid rating the main competition and Un Certain Regard entries, the highest praise being a golden palm and the lowest a frowning emoticon, with one to three stars in between. A dozen-plus critics (not one woman, as far as I could tell) produced a boulevard of gold palms for Adèle. There was but one three-star entry and a single miserable emoticon. (The Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis was a distant second overall.)”
“After five movies, Kechiche has demonstrated himself to be a man of tremendous voraciousness. He can’t resist a close-up, even if it’s tough to decipher what it is you’re looking at. Nor can he resist ugly lighting for sex scenes. Here his appetites extend from food, faces, and flesh to dwelling at length on the extraordinary inability of Exarchopoulos’s mouth to close completely. Both she and Seydoux give to their acting everything an actor can give. By the time it was over, I, too, was covered in sweat and tears and snot. Some movies make you reach for a tissue. This movie treats you like one.”
“All that was left was the announcement of the Palme d’Or. Given that the festival likes to spread the wealth, it could have been dozens of films, but in the end, there was only one choice. So Tautou brought out Uma Thurman (gunmetal-gray gown, scalloped Art Deco bodice), then asked Steven Spielberg to put us out of our misery. He stood and offered a preface, which he hadn’t done in the announcement of previous verdicts. The jury, he said, had made the unusual decision of awarding the prize to “three artists.” At that point, I couldn’t have been alone in assuming that he meant a three-way tie. My jaw had already dropped when he clarified that by three artists, he meant “Adèle, Léa, and Abdellatif.” The room’s reaction was like watching your team score a winning goal in overtime. The place rose to its feet and stayed there, clapping, crying, freaking out, for about two full minutes. One American man, seated toward the back of the house, actually screamed in shock. I tried to find out who he was, but he was already being consoled while he teared up and tweeted.”
“Even if Adèle doesn’t work for some critics and moviegoers, it was held up by nine artists perceptive enough to give Kechiche the benefit of the doubt and insist that the film’s vision, inasmuch as there is one, would never have come to fruition without Exarchopoulos and Seydoux. That feels like an extraordinary statement, not about marriage equality (this is not a film about rights or the lack of any) but about how we perceive the sex. Ascribing authorship of the film to the women won’t change the belief that Kechiche is just exploring a banal male fantasy, but it does enrich an eternal discourse.”
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/78072/cannes-diary-days-10-12-spielberg-explicit-sex-and-a-seriously-shocking-win
The Playlist links an article written by Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel from which the movie was based on and apparently she doesn’t like the famous sex scenes very much. http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/blue-is-the-warmest-color-author-julie-maroh-not-pleased-with-graphic-sex-in-film-20130528
I still want to see this movie to get my own idea, so I hope it opens here soon.
I don’t care about the predatory aspects of it. Lesbians bore me.
You bore me.
nvm I retract. Kathy Bates was a riot in PRIMARY COLORS. Lesbians often bore me, especially in movies. All better?
People who say they’re bored, bore me.
If you ever replied with the comment:
“yawn”
then you bore me.
As if a “yawn” somehow puts people in their place:
Hey, you got me there. I made you yawn.
boring…
And we should give a shit because….
Try painting with a slightly smaller brush next time.
Sasha Stone @AwardsDaily 22 May
So many movies about the sexual awakenings of young women. I guess dudes be pretty into that and shit, huh. #cannes2013
Sasha Stone @AwardsDaily 22 May
Needed a naked lady having sexual awakening RT @wellshwood: Believe it or not, Cannes F.F. didn’t want “All Is Lost” playing on competition
Sasha, I don’t get it. Are you against the film winning the Palm d’or or not? You’re always talking about the sex scenes. Come on, there’s much more to the film. You complained all the time about the fact that Cannes had 2 films in competition about young women and sexuality. Stop acting this way. The critics loved it. It was the film that was most talked about in Cannes this year. Even Spielberg loves it. I’m sure the film is beautifully done and all the sex scenes have a purpose to the story. You should be disturbed about other things portrayed in film, not explicit sex scenes. You’re always complaining about lack of stories revolving around women, and when something so special and different like La vie d’Adele comes, you complain about it… Kechiche is an amazing director. Go rent L’esquive, Secret of the Grain and Black Venus.
Pete, let me break it down for you. Sasha is comparing/contrasting the views of two critics who have seen the film, withholding her judgement until she can say the same. She isn’t complaining about the sex scenes, but there are respected critics who have, and that is interesting and important to note. It’s a thoughtful, well-written exploration of what is being said, with useful observations regarding similar-themed, male-directed films. Obviously Sasha hasn’t formed her opinion, SHE HASN’T SEEN IT. And neither have you.
‘Wait and see’ approach is where I will stay with regarding this movie. Think of how the Black Swan scene was marketed versus what was shown in the movie. I’d love to know who was turned on by that because within the context of the story Nina can not even enjoy it herself because whether it is happening or not occurs to her and the question of whether or not Lily in that scene is performing out of lust or something darker.
Stephanie Zacharek, Karina Longworth, and Guy Lodge are critics that I trust who were more positive on the film and even thought that scene in question was beautifully done. Manohla Dargis is my favorite working critic due to our similar tastes but I have disagreed with her before. For all I know I could agree with her very much or just not. I just hope this movie that everybody seems to have an opinion on comes to America not compromised due to censorship.
Have we gotten rid of the thumbs up / down thing btw? Hope so, it was pissing me off.
P.S. I used it all the fucking time.
RIP Thumbelina
noooo! this is bullshit!
Many even believed that Steven Spielberg (who directed the Color Purple, for goddsakes) would not have the maturity or sensibility to allow the Palme d’or to be given to this film.
Yeah, and directed almost every tinge of lesbianism out of it. Spielberg’s neutering of Alice Walker’s book is plainly offensive.
Steven Spielberg has not directed a good sex scene in his career to date. In fact, I think he’s only even tried a proper sex scene once, in Munich, and that was far and away the worst part of that otherwise very good film.
Test
Sasha, please consider Marion Cotillard in Best Actress category with her superb performance in The Immigrant.