Blue Is the Warmest Color New York Times Movie Review
Seeing You Seeing Me
It was her derrière that starting time caught my middle. Specifically, it was the mode the photographic camera captured the pretty teenager's rear end in "Blueish Is the Warmest Color" and then that it was centered and foregrounded in the frame. It is a lovely derrière, no question, round, meaty and house, and I became well acquainted with how information technology looked whether tucked into snug jeans or perched prettily in the air when Adèle, who'south 15 when the movie opens, lies splayed sleeping face downward in bed, as young children frequently do. The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, I realized fairly speedily, likes a tight end.
Listen you lot, I thought the same near Mike Nichols, given the attention he lavished on Natalie Portman's rear in his 2004 film, "Closer." This observation was a data bespeak that I stashed in my files, where I've also noted that Alfred Hitchcock preferred blondes, and Quentin Tarantino likes pretty feet. For the most office, this information doesn't factor into my thinking about these filmmakers, fifty-fifty if information technology is unsettling to hear Tippi Hedren brand Hitchcock as a sexual predator. The truth is, if I were hung up about every predatory managing director or every degrading image of a woman, I couldn't exist a film critic. So I watch, loving movies that don't necessarily love or fifty-fifty like women.
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Does it thing that Mr. Kechiche appears to take a matter for rear ends? Mr. Kechiche, subsequently all, elevated i such rear into art, or so the consensus was in May at the Cannes Motion-picture show Festival, where "Blue Is the Warmest Color" won the Palme d'Or. In an unusual motion, the jury, led by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme to Mr. Kechiche and his stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. This "infrequent step," Mr. Spielberg said as he appear the winners, was taken to recognize "the achievements of three artists." By asserting that the actresses were co-creators of the movie, the jury had acknowledged that movies are also made by their performers, an idea that gently chips away at auteurism, one of the critic'south favorite interpretive strategies.
"Blue Is the Warmest Color," which has now opened in the United States, is a sexual coming-of-age story most a French provincial voluptuary, Adèle (Ms. Exarchopoulos). She'southward a teenager with strong appetites — she keeps sweets stashed under her bed — whose hunger has a distinctly carnal attribute and invokes an association betwixt literal and sexual appetite that has probably been around since Eve took a seize with teeth of that troublesome apple tree. Adèle stuffs her mouth with nutrient, even as she remains unnourished by her high school boyfriend. She's only sated when afterwards she falls for Emma (Ms. Seydoux), the blue-haired artist with whom she forms a bond as emotionally and psychologically intense as it is sexually pleasurable. They fall in love, move in together, and so it falls autonomously.
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I first saw "Blue Is the Warmest Color" at Cannes, where I wrote 399 dissenting words on the pic and raised some of the issues I had with information technology. I wrote that Mr. Kechiche was a self-indulgent filmmaker (the movie runs three hours), and mentioned a scene in which a man talks about fine art and female orgasms. Primarily, I questioned Mr. Kechiche'due south representation of the female body. By keeping so shut to Adèle, he seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face. However, early on, this sense of the graphic symbol's interiority dissolves when the camera roves over her body even while she is sleeping. Is Adèle, I had wondered then, dreaming of her own hot body?
I received flak for my comments, which was unsurprising considering I had criticized a movie that other people love, raising questions nearly pleasance and a manager whose want felt more at stake than that of his characters. Some critics decided that I was really complaining about pornography, which was surprising considering, while the movie uses some of that genre's conventions, it'due south articulate that the sex was pantomimed. In June, Owen Gleiberman, from Entertainment Weekly, wrote a long blog post in which he took outcome with my comments and those of Julie Maroh, who wrote the graphic novel on which the movie is based. By that point, she had weighed in on Mr. Kechiche'south adaptation, calling it "coherent, justified and fluid."
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But she too expressed unhappiness with the sex scenes with Adèle and Emma. "It appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians." Mr. Gleiberman took this to mean that Ms. Maroh was maxim that real lesbians should have played the roles, although that is not what she wrote. What she did write was that "except for a few passages — this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical brandish, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and fabricated me experience very ill at ease."
Ms. Maroh saw a connectedness betwixt the way Mr. Kechiche shot the sexual activity scenes and another scene in which characters talk about what she called "the myth of the feminine orgasm" as "mystic and far superior to the masculine ane." She added: "Merely hither nosotros go, to sacralize once more womanhood in such ways. I find information technology dangerous." She was raising a red flag near an essentialist view of female sexuality, in which women, with their holy orgasms, are thought to embody an innate and eternal mystery. In "The Second Sex," Simone de Beauvoir termed this the mythic idea of "the eternal feminine," one that does not business relationship for the "multiple beingness of women."
Prototype
Ms. Maroh's description of the sex activity scenes as both pornographic and conveying a sense that women are sacred might seem contradictory, except that both the pornographic and the sacred generally care for women equally abstractions instead of mankind-and-blood individuals. Pornography involves real sex and has one blissfully obvious objective: to plow viewers on. "Blue" isn't a bluish movie; information technology's just a formally standard example of European fine art cinema that comes with the usual ambitions, pleasure and art included. All the same, I tin see why someone might detect it pornographic given the visual conventions that Mr. Kechiche used, including close-ups that assert that, as a journalist, Liza Katzman, one time said of pornography, "The drama of a woman's pleasance is written not on her genitals, but her confront."
From the showtime, Mr. Kechiche puts us spatially close to Adèle, a proximity that I think is meant to create, to borrow a phrase from George Eliot, the "extension of our sympathies." Yet if my sympathies didn't extend, it's partly because Mr. Kechiche employs a selective aesthetic that shows Adèle slurping her food ("You're voracious," Emma says) merely, importantly, does not let her a similarly sloppy appetite in bed, where the picture show's carefully constructed realism is jettisoned along with bodily excesses and excretions in favor of tasteful, decorous poses. This may exist what Ms. Maroh meant when she said the sex scenes were missing lesbians; I'd go farther and say they're missing women of whatever kind. Adèle'south hunger is contained, prettified, aestheticized.
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This isn't a question of "the male gaze," an idea from feminist film theory and a phrase that has been thrown around a lot by admirers of the movie and that I purposely didn't utilise in May. The pic has run-of-the mill representational bug, which is why I quoted the art critic John Berger'due south useful axiom from his 1972 book, "Ways of Seeing." "Men await at women," Berger wrote. "Women watch themselves being looked at." Information technology's a conception that may not work for all men and all women, as many feminist moving picture theorists have argued. But Berger's comment retains its relevance, and it'south apt given the fine art lesson that a man delivers to some women in "Blue Is the Warmest Color."
The lecture takes place during a party given by Adèle and Emma. Adèle has get Emma'due south muse, a familiar division of labor that carries into the kitchen, where Adèle cooks the nutrient. Later, with the party in full swing, a man begins talking virtually art and orgasms. "Ever since women have been shown in paintings, their ecstasy is shown more than men's, whose is shown via adult female," he says without a hint of irony. "Men attempt desperately to draw it." Three women offer short retorts, including that "it could be a fantasy." Unstoppable, he adds, "Fine art by women never tackles female person pleasure." The women, including Emma, a erstwhile student at the École des Beaux-Arts, remain silent. None mention that historically, women were ofttimes barred from working with nude models.
The women's silence is deafening and, like the sex scenes, punctures the motion-picture show's realism. It isn't that it's inconceivable that a man, an art blazon whom Emma thinks could help her career, would yammer on at a political party almost representations and female orgasms to women who say little. It's improbable merely not unimaginable. The homo's words and the women'due south silence are aesthetic choices, and as much a function of the movie's meaning equally the hand-held cinematography; Adèle'southward appetite; her work with children; the absence of a score; and her silent, downward expect later on a human being at the same party asks her what sex with Emma is like and so asks Adèle if she wants to exist a mother. All these add together information and at times serve as metacommentaries on the female person torso on display in "Blue."
Watching the moving-picture show at Cannes, I couldn't help thinking of the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's first feature, "Je Tu Il Elle," which has a lengthy sex scene between two immature women. Ms. Akerman, who plays the protagonist, filmed the scene in medium long shot without any of the visual codes (shut-ups, fragmented bodies) used in mainstream pornography. It's infrequent that you see female pleasure similar this or even a shot like the one of Brad Pitt's torso in "Thelma & Louise," which shows you what Thelma sees before making honey. In that location'south a banality to how a lot of directors represent female bodies and female pleasure, partly because they borrow from the industrial handbook of male person-oriented pornography.
In truth, it isn't sex activity per se that makes "Bluish Is the Warmest Colour" problematic; it's the patriarchal anxieties virtually sex activity, female appetite and motherhood that leach into its sights and sounds and the mode it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female person body. In the logic of the film, Adèle'south body is a mystery that needs solving and, for a cursory while, information technology seems as if Emma will help solve information technology. In "The Second Sex," Beauvoir wrote that "the erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambivalence of their condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and spirit, as the other and as the subject." This is the ideal, but for Adèle, the erotic experience leads to despair, agony, isolation. The body betrays her — just like a woman.
That wouldn't be the first time that happened to a female graphic symbol, though as information technology happens, as a movie critic, I spend more time looking at men'south bodies than women's. Mainstream movies, especially from the big studios, are now overwhelmingly dominated by male-driven stories, made past men, for men. Feminists accept taken issues with old Hollywood representations of women, but at least its star organization provided a rich body of piece of work, which is 1 reason yous don't often read feminists talking about movies outside academia and Jezebel.com. There's non much to talk over. That'due south some other reason "Blue" is interesting: It'south a 3-hour moving-picture show nearly women, a rare object of critical inquiry peradventure especially for American men working in the male-dominated field of movie critics. The truth is nosotros need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to go this chat actually started.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/the-trouble-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html
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