Last year’s Palme D’Or winner at Cannes, graphic novel adaptation Blue is the Warmest Colour, took home the Best International Film award at the Independent Spirit Awards tonight.The film, based on the French graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude (“blue is a warm colour”), by Julie Maroh, is a three-hour, visually explicit lesbian love story that got only a limited release in the United States and was rated NC-17.The film is sweeping the foreign film categories in many of this season’s awards shows, but did not receive any Academy Award nominations. It was deemed ineligible for consideration for the Best Foreign Film trophy because its distributor would not release it early in order to make a deadline; they reportedly objected to the policy since if it was an American film, it would have been eligible with its original release date intact.
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“We spent 10 days on just that one scene. It wasn’t like, “OK, today we’re going to shoot the sex scene!” It was 10 days,” added her co-star Léa Seydoux.They also noted that they hardly knew each other prior to beginning the sex scene, which was one of the first things they had to film, and that they were largely subject to Kechiche’s whims throughout production.”The thing is, in France, it’s not like in the States. The director has all the power. When you’re an actor on a film in France and you sign the contract, you have to give yourself, and in a way you’re trapped,” said Seydoux.
Julie Maroh, whose graphic novel was being adapted, also criticized the sex scenes in the film, saying that the film was shot from a very male point of view.”It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians,” Maroh wrote. “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.”
