, the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at Cannes, will be released to U.S. theaters with an NC-17 rating, its exhibitor announced today. As far as we can tell, it will be the first comic book/graphic novel adaptation to be released with the rating.The rating is a mixed bag; on the one hand, it means that Sundance Selects will release the film without cuts to the controversial adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est un couleur chaude, a lesbian romance that screened at Cannes with what’s been described as very graphic depictions of lesbian sex. That should please the filmmakers and cinema purists, who tend to criticize the temptation to edit art movies down to an R.On the other hand, not making cuts means that the film’s box office potential–and more importantly its opportunity to expand beyond a very small release aimed at hardcore cinemaphiles–is very limited.”This is a landmark film with two of the best female performances we have ever seen on screen,” Sundance Selects/IFC Films President Jonathan Sehring said. “The film is first and foremost a film about love, coming of age and passion. We refuse to compromise Kechiche’s vision by trimming the film for an R rating.”He added that NC-17 no longer holds the sigma that it once did–after all, there have been films with an NC-17 rating that have performed reasonably well at the box office and better critically, and before an NC-17 was created Midnight Cowboy was the first X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (it would have been an NC-17 if such a rating existed at the time of its release). Still, most mainstream theater chains will not exhibit an NC-17 film.At the time of its Cannes win, there was already discussion about how it would get released in the U.S., with the entertainment press speculating that it would undergo changes to qualify for an R-rating.
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