![]() The class differences, Kechiche suggests, are what threaten their relationship more than anything having to do with age or gender. Adèle’s family are more traditional (they’re the ones who make the Bolognese-“simple but delicious” as Emma calls it while Emma’s parents serve raw oysters with a squirt of lemon and glasses of highly-deliberated-over white wine.) They think Emma is Adèle’s philosophy tutor and inquire about her boyfriend (she tells them he’s in “business,” which is exactly what they want to hear). Likewise, Emma is out and proud to her intellectual mother and epicurean step-father. She keeps characterizing Adèle to her friends as a “writer” because somehow saying that her girlfriend simply likes to read isn’t enough. ![]() Emma is an artist, who surrounds herself with creative types and art patrons. Adèle is a smart girl but she has simple needs: She likes to read and she wants to teach children. If Kechiche’s primary concerns are with the flesh, his film is also about class and how a certain kind of elitism can corrupt a relationship. Finally, she finds her way to a lesbian bar, meets Emma, and they begin a love affair. Then she has a fumbling encounter with a female classmate, a poor substitute for her fantasy girl. She tries sex with a popular boy, but finds it unfulfilling. What she is is completely consumed by the pixie in the park. Whether Adèle is a lesbian or not is never totally clear. Their eyes meet-Emma has a particularly amused, knowing way of carrying herself-and Adèle’s life is changed forever. She’ll soon experience that phenomenon herself, passing by the punky, blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux) in the park. When we first meet Adèle (Adèle Exarchopolous), she is in class reading La Vie de Marianne and learning about the exquisite agony of love at first sight. The whole film is an orgy of human desire.Īnd it’s a remarkable achievement: A three-hour film about a subject no less well-trodden than a young girl’s first love that is absolutely mesmerizing from beginning to end. He eroticizes a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese as much as a naked breast. ![]() But he doesn’t only apply this gaze to the sex scenes. Aren’t all films essentially the “gaze” of the director? Yes, Kechiche’s film is abundantly sensual-fleshy, you might even say. What’s more, some female viewers, lesbians in particular, felt that Kechiche’s film was more about the male gaze than real intimacy between two women.ĭefending a film against accusations of the “male gaze” is a bit tricky. The two young actresses at the heart of the love story said they felt bullied and exploited by director Abdellatif Kechiche and that he forced them into graphic sexual intimacy they weren’t comfortable with. If you’re not up on la controverse de Cannes, the movie won the Palme d’Or at this year’s festival but was immediately dogged by negative publicity. I never thought I’d utter this phrase: I loved Blue is the Warmest Color despite its seven-minute sex scene. ![]()
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