![]() ![]() Kechiche sees the theme of the film as nothing less than “experience: love, passion, destiny, relationships, breakups. And yet, the point of the film, for its director, is about swallowing what life hands you and growing up. The optics of the Maghreb filmmaker and the white French aristocrat are inévitable. Not to get into my social origins, but I’ve seen hard labor, and it is not comparable.” His choice of words seemed to point at Léa Seydoux, who comes from a highly prominent French family dotted with chairmen and C.E.O.s of film companies, and with money invested in oil and soccer clubs. You wake up, you’re made up, you do a few takes, you’re beautifully lit. “The job of an actor,” he went on, “it’s one of a spoiled child. To talk about the suffering of the actor is something I can only laugh at-in such a beautiful profession, where you’re creating through your emotions, your body-to me, there is nothing of suffering.” “The word ‘suffering’ is completely inappropriate to use about the process of filming. “I certainly have never made anyone suffer,” he said, in well-wrought French. He declined my charge, and blew smoke at the implication. In spectacles and black vestments, he’s a severe type who demands of even fast-talking Americans total comfort with long pauses. Last week, in Manhattan, I asked Kechiche if the problem was that the actresses couldn’t countenance the ugly work that goes into beautiful product. “If my film hadn’t succeeded at Cannes,” he wrote, “I would be a director destroyed … a dead man.” In a note, the site’s editor-in-chief describes warning Kechiche that he might come across as paranoid Kechiche responded that he’d rather that “than ‘tyrant’ or ‘despot’, which is what I’ve been called.” And yet, the show goes on for American theatres everywhere except (so far) Idaho, the film comes out-with an NC-17 rating-Friday. The film’s release, the director said, “should be cancelled.” On Wednesday, the French news Web site Rue89 published a scathing op-ed by Kechiche, addressed “to those who wanted to destroy” his film, alleging slander by a leading French journalist as well as Seydoux. ![]() In late September, Kechiche told the French magazine Télérama that the outrage had “sullied” the film for future audiences now the public would wonder whether he’d harassed the exquisite starlets. Seydoux, who plays Emma, said she felt like a “prostitute.” Exarchopoulos described a “horrible” continuous take in which Seydoux hit her over and over, leaving her raw. The French union representing the film industry spoke of deplorable conditions for the crew. Then, later in summer, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos said that the shooting had been unbearable and they would never again work with Kechiche. Kechiche,” as Manohla Dargis wrote, you wouldn’t have known: the red carpet was witness to a symphony of happy symmetry as the established Léa Seydoux, twenty-eight, and the newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos, nineteen, flanked their director and kissed him. If this “ took some auteur sheen away from Mr. “Three artists,” Spielberg said that May day. The 2013 Cannes jury, presided over by Steven Spielberg, awarded the top prize not only to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, but to the lead actresses, too. Force and firepower, Anthony Lane writes in his review of the film in the magazine this week, that amounts to “a fusillade of cries and clutches, grabs and slaps-a pitch of pleasure so entwined with desperation that we find ourselves not in the realm of the pornographic but on the brink of romantic agony.” “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” in French “La Vie d’Adèle-Chapitres 1 et 2,” shows some of the more potent and torrid sex scenes in popular memory: sex scenes between two women, one lasting seven intimate minutes. This exchange between the two, whose ardors we follow over years, mirrors a debate being hashed out over the film. “Beaux-Arts?” Adèle, always hungry, wants to know. Emma replies that she studies at the École des Beaux-Arts. When the chance at conversation arises, Adèle asks Emma, somewhat mechanically, what she does. Adèle, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, has already spotted Emma, a blue-haired sparkplug, on the street, and pleasured herself to thoughts of her. In “ Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, our brightly burning heroines first meet in a lesbian bar in Lille.
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