But despite the heft of the nude scenes in “Blue,” its prominence in complaints against the movie created the perception that the scenes dominated it. It was an odd choice of words given the topic. I didn’t want to do it in a sort of frontal fashion.” “The danger was to turn it into something that would be a militant or flag-waving kind of film,” he said. “But of course there was this desire to talk about a community that’s not necessarily visible in cinema.” He said he resisted the temptation to politicize the drama. “I didn’t think when were shooting this film that there was still such a taboo against homosexuality in France,” he said. Kechiche had faced controversy surrounding “Blue is the Warmest Color” in his country as well. More than anything else, Kechiche looked tired, and so did his translator. He was dead serious, reserved and seemingly afraid to offer beyond a few words of insight about his movie at a time. READ MORE: Abdellatif Kechiche Corrects the Record On “Blue Is the Warmest Color”įour and a half months after Cannes, Kechiche sat down for an interview in a downtown Manhattan hotel looking little like he had in that celebratory Cannes moment. In a remark he would later recant and explain as an off-the-cuff expression of frustration, Kechiche told a French magazine that audience expectations ahead of the movie’s theatrical release led him to decide it shouldn’t be released at all. The conversation surrounding the movie would grow even more heated when both actresses seemingly turned against the project, describing the shooting experience to interviewers as so degrading that they never wanted to work with Kechiche again. “The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous.” “This was what was missing on the set: lesbians,” she wrote in French after attending a screening. A few weeks after the festival, that perspective took on greater ramifications when 27-year-old Julie Maroh, whose graphic novel provided the basis for Kechiche’s story, posted a blog deriding the film’s “so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.” She found the scenes laughably unrealistic. It was a nifty photo opportunity, but it would eventually provide ammunition for critics perturbed by the perceived masculine gaze in Kechiche’s depiction of sexuality. A widely circulated snapshot from the occasion captured the euphoria of the moment: Kechiche, his eyes closed and his face seemingly frozen in a Cheshire Cat grin, surrounded by his giddy stars as they planted smooches on either side of his face. Not only did “Blue Is the Warmest Color” win the Palme d’Or, but the jury stipulated that the top prize belonged to both Kechiche and his two actresses as well. While the media focused on a graphic six-and-a-half minute sex scene between the women - at one point misreporting it at 20 minutes long - the high profile jury, headed by Steven Spielberg, saw a much bigger picture. The French director of the acclaimed dramas “Black Venus” and “The Secret of the Grain,” Kechiche had completed what was possibly his most ambitious work to date, a two-and-a-half hour coming-of-age drama about a pair of young female lovers (19-year-old newcomer Adele Exarchoupolos and rising star Lea Seydoux) who fall in and out of an intense romance as they grapple with big ideas. In May, Abdellatif Kechiche and the cast of “Blue is the Warmest Color” looked like they were on top of the world.
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