CANNES, France—In a lengthy and passionate blog post that expresses how and why she feels the way she does about this year’s surprise Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival by Blue is the Warmest Colour, which was adapted by director Abdellatif Kechiche from her 2010 graphic novel, "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude,” Julie Maroh does her best to express heartfelt appreciation for the “vast and intense” process she has been going through in the immediate lead-up and aftermath of the “wonderful and breathtaking” win at Cannes.
But what comes through most forcefully in her missive is not appreciation but the disappointment she feels about the film itself, despite calling it “coherent, justified and fluid … a master stroke.” It is her ability to explain the separation between her clear admiration for the movie and her tangible frustration with the result that makes the post a compelling read, even if she does disparage porn in it.
Maroh actually reduces her core grievance to one sentence with a rather cutting observation, “It appears to me that this is what was missing on the set: lesbians.” But she hardly leaves it at that.
"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," she continues, speaking specifically of the much-talked-about sex scenes. "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,” she continued, “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 [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling.
"The heteronormative laughed,” she added,” because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen."
Ouch, that hurts, though if anyone has a right to go there, it’s Julie Maroh, who also observes that the adaptation, while it may be a master stroke, is also just “another vision/version/reality of the same story” she wrote in "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude.”
She explains, “One couldn’t possibly annihilate the other. What came out of Kechiche’s film reminds me of the little rocks that mutilate our flesh when we fall and scrape ourselves on the asphalt.”
More ouch. At the end of her piece, Maroh finally reveals another (more personal) reason why the win is bittersweet for her. The director totally omitted her from his acceptance speech, snubbed her on the red carpet and apparently kept her out of the loop during production. Of course, she doesn’t feel “any bitterness” about these things, and readily admits, “I lost the control of my book as soon as I gave it away to be read.” Kechiche, like all the readers before him, she observes graciously, “entered it and identified in a unique way. As the author, I totally lose my control over that, and it would have never crossed my mind to wait for Kechiche to go in any particular direction, since he made it his own, from a story that didn’t belong to me as soon as it was sold in a bookstore.”
But he couldn't find one lesbian?
Many rofessional critics have reacted to Maroh's comments by defending the film's inegrity and its sex scenes.
Photo: Director Abdellatif Kechiche and the two allegedly non-lesbian leads, Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos.
