![]() ![]() ![]() Scenes are allowed to unspool slowly, performances played out in close to real time, honed through improvisation and repetition. If the sex scenes in Blue are graphic, with the full-on abandon of a youthful libido, then so are the meals, shot through with gusto and the close-up, openmouthed enjoyment of flavors and textures both food and relationships tend to take center stage in his work. Kechiche is a director who pays close attention to how people live, constructing his characters through gestures, social interactions, slang, and, above all, food. ![]() At the Telluride Film Festival, Seydoux said that she’d wanted to make Blue “because he’s the best director working in France now,” and Exarchopoulos agreed. Seydoux and Exarchopoulos certainly knew this. Clearly, Kechiche is a star maker, adept at spotting and grooming new talent. Notably, both also won the César for most promising actress for their stars, Sara Forestier and Hafsia Herzi (and Yahima Torres, star of his 2010 Black Venus, was nominated for the same award). Two of his earlier films, Games of Love and Chance (2003) and The Secret of the Grain (2007), had won French cinema’s highest award, the César, for best film, best director, and best screenplay. Kechiche came to Blue with considerable success already in hand. At any rate, it’s a beautifully filmed, carefully told, exciting, sprawling, and ultimately emotionally devastating chronicle. That length may well be an intended bulwark against prurience: anyone going for salacious reasons will have to pay-with their time-for the privilege, and possibly exhaust that impulse along the way. And he expanded the format to an epic: his Blue demands viewers’ attention for a full 179 minutes of measured, deliberative observations of a young woman’s adolescence, erotic awakening, and maturation. Kechiche and his screenwriters put flesh on the bones of author Julie Maroh’s lovers. Blue’s English-language title comes from the French comic book on which its story is based, Le bleu est une couleur chaude. On-screen, Blue Is the Warmest Color actually plays as a classic European art film, heavily influenced by the new realism of a post- Amélie French cinema yet concerned with the oldest subject around: young love and coming-of-age. release, even as American audiences began to line up around the block for the chance to make up their own minds. These disclosures fractured the initial red-carpet alliance and threatened to cast a shadow over the film on the eve of its U.S. Meanwhile, complaints by the actresses and some crew members over directorial demands during production began to surface as well. Critiques of the film slammed the authenticity of the lesbian sex, as assessed by some important critics and lesbian commentators, including the author of its source, a graphic novel. The three shared the stage, the red carpet, the media blitz.Īlmost immediately, however, a storm of another sort erupted over two aspects of the film: the duration and shooting style of the sex scenes, on the one hand, and the behind-the-scenes dynamics on the set, on the other. Astonishingly, in an unprecedented nod to collaboration at the resolutely auteur-focused event, the jury specified that the prize was to be shared between the director and his two stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, without whose intense participation and improvisation the film would not have had its remarkable power and passion. Blue won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest award, the Palme d’Or, in May of 2013, taking the town by storm. Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color arrived in a world seemingly beset by a peculiar amnesia, according to which no director had ever made an art film with sex scenes (certainly not lesbian ones) before, no audience had ever seen one, no critic had ever been tasked with reviewing one. ![]()
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