After
Blue Is the Warmest Colour won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival you would figure everyone associated with the film would be patting each other on the back. But a few days later, the graphic novelist
Julie Maroh took aim at the film's lesbian sex scenes. Here is an excerpt from her
Julie blog:
I don't know the sources of information for the director and the actresses (who are all straight, unless proven otherwise) and I was never consulted upstream. Maybe there was someone there to awkwardly imitate the possible positions with their hands, and/or to show them some porn of so-called "lesbians" (unfortunately it's hardly ever actually for a lesbian audience). Because -- except for a few passages -- this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theater, everyone was giggling. The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.
That's not all! At the
Telluride festival the stars of the film, 19-year-old Adèle Exarchopoulos and 28-year-old Léa Seydoux revealed that that their director (Abdellatif Kechiche) spent 10 grueling days filming the 10 minutes love scene. They also stated that Kechiche ordered Seydoux to slap her co-star for real. The director did respond to the accusations, and placed the blame on Seydoux's inability to inhabit her part. Either way, I'm check this film out.
Acclaimed French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche’s latest, based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, was the sensation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival even before it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Adèle Exarchopoulos is a young woman whose longings and ecstasies and losses are charted across a span of several years. Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) is the older woman who excites her desire and becomes the love of her life. Kechiche’s movie is, like the films of John Cassavetes, an epic of emotional transformation that pulses with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation. It is a profoundly moving hymn to both love and life.
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Salim Kechiouche, Jérémie Laheurte
Writers: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix, Julie Maroh
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