Lesbian story suffers from male direction
Blue Is the Warmest Color (out of five) Starring: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jérémie Laheurte, Salim Kechiouche Directed by: Abdellatif Kechiche Running time: 179 minutes Advisory: Restricted; French with English subtitles Playing at: Metro Cinema
Oh. Oh. Oh …
Don’t get excited. Those were not expressions of Sapphic excitement on my part, but of bewilderment, tinged with embarrassment and pure camp glee at the breathless inanity of it all.
It’s not that Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the Cannes-lauded drama that netted the Palme d’Or for director Abdellatif Kechiche and bestactress laurels for stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, doesn’t have moments where it’s smart and sexy.
And it’s not like we don’t need more people solving their problems at the end of smoking cigarettes instead of smoking pistols.
It’s just that Kechiche’s creation feels like soft porn fantasy wrapped in art film cellophane. What’s the difference between any European art film and soft porn, you ask? It’s not an easy answer, but this self-conscious and awkwardly paced piece offers an excellent case study of what separates the two.
His most indecent act is the running time itself. Clocking in at a truly obscene 179 minutes, Kechiche forces us to sit in our seats for three hours as he plays out the drama between Adèle (Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) — two star-crossed lovers who eventually turn a glance into a relationship.
Women are good at doing that sort of thing. We’re also good at a lot of other things, too, but Kechiche really wants to focus on a few particular skills in the female tool box.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour offers one of the longest “love scenes” seen in recent memory, and if it ran the normal span, the sexual content alone would count for a third of the film.
As it is, the 30-or-so minutes we spend in bed with the women seem relatively conventional given it’s a three-hour romance, but Kechiche doesn’t shoot his heroines with any tremble of true love — and therein lies the throbbing problem with this movie.
There’s a penis waving at us from behind the fourth wall: Kechiche’s camera probes every centimetre of Exarchopoulos’s orifices in close-up. We move from mouth to nether regions in a steady rhythm. We become the peeper as well as the passive playmate.
For many viewers, including many of the male critics who melted into their chairs with appreciation at Cannes, this visual feast of female sexuality will probably prove rather entrancing.
There’s no question Seydoux and Exarchopoulos are incredibly attractive young women, and there’s also no question they’re completely naked in a way few actors are ever shown on camera.
Their fearlessness allows the performances to transcend the schlockey text, and raise Blue Is the Warmest Colour to a level of competent soap opera with sexy bits and two well-crafted emotional arcs at the core.
But for all the hard work from the gals who get their thespian lesbian mojo in gear, Kechiche’s direction feels limp and frustrating as he looks for the defining moments in a hot tub full of distractions and endless shots of Exarchopoulos’s lips.
The director’s wandering eye destroys any genuine sense of romance because it’s filtered by lust.
We’re not looking at Adèle through Emma’s eyes, making the hunger on the other side of the camera feel exploitative in its graphic insistence on showing us everything.
Sexuality generally described as “female” doesn’t get its yonic yayas out through visual stimuli. Women are turned on by the tingle of taboo, a yearning for the forbidden, and steamy thoughts of hot, passionate lovemaking with the object of their desire.
It’s all in our heads. We don’t need to see pictures of anyone’s junk.
Kechiche would have been better off making a much shorter movie that explored the emotional dimensions of love with as much depth as the physical ones, but he fails to get inside the head of either character.