![]() ![]() Reverse Shot’s Farihah Zaman, for instance, suggests that Kechiche identifies with his heroines precisely by taking on their sexual desires: “the film doesn’t linger on sexuality because it pleases the gaze of the director or even the audience, but because that is what pleases its characters.”ĭargis writes that “this isn’t a question of ‘the male gaze,’” but simply a more general, “run-of-the mill representational problem.” At root, the trouble might be that Kechiche stays so firmly rooted in his own perspective that he can only think to access Adèle’s subjective experience by filming her outer appearance “with scrutinizing closeness ” by lingering over the contours of her body and the classical perfection of her face. One response might be that, if Adèle isn’t dreaming of her own body, she might at least be dreaming of the female body in general. Is Adèle, I had wondered, dreaming of her own hot body?” In her coverage of Cannes for the July/August issue of Film Comment, Amy Taubin likewise called Kechiche out for having said, “with a stunning lack of awareness, that the film is couched in Adèle’s subjectivity.” She continues (noticing, like Dargis, Kechiche’s anatomical focus): “Even Jean-Luc Godard, the most dedicated of ass men-‘A woman is her ass,’ he once remarked, although I doubt he’d venture as much today-did not confuse his POV with that of the women he captured with his lens.” For these two critics, then, the chief issue isn’t that Kechiche obsesses over his heroine’s body it’s that he tries to convince us that he’s doing so as a means of identifying with her. Yet, early on, this sense of the character’s interiority dissolves when the camera roves over her body even while she is sleeping. “By keeping so close to Adèle,” chimes in Manohla Dargis, in the latest of several New York Times treatments of the film, “Kechiche seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face. Scott writes in The New York Times, praising the film for its “ardent and sincere commitment to capturing the fullness of Adèle’s experience-sensory, cerebral and emotional.” In Scott’s view, Kechiche’s scrupulous attention to his heroine’s face-which he captures in emotional states ranging from ecstatic to hysterical to reflective to resigned-is an attempt to burrow deeper into her inner life.įor a contingent of the movie’s objectors, Keciche’s visual strategy is either clouded or corrupt. “ Exarchopoulos almost never departs from the camera’s scrutiny,” A.O. In fact, the movie’s most unusual feature might be purely formal: what Dennis Lim, writing on the film from Cannes, called its “dogged, airless conception of naturalism, predicated on distended scenes and a surplus of close-ups.” Whole sequences single-mindedly zero in on his two heroine’s faces while giving a dim idea of their immediate surroundings: when, for instance, the film’s teenage heroine Adèle walks down a busy street or floats face-up in the sea, Kechiche rarely shows us what she might be seeing. It’s riddled with many of the problems that tend to spring up when male directors try to film their heroine’s inner lives, and ultimately grounded in familiar, well-trod emotional territory. What’s left is a relationship drama of uncommon scope and ambition, set apart by its idiosyncratic form and its frank treatment of gay experience in its chronicle of two young women in and out of love over six years. Forget, in short, all the baggage Blue Is the Warmest Color accumulated as it rolled down the festival circuit and slowly evolved from a movie into a cultural event. Forget the stories of Abdellatif Kechiche’s grueling working methods, the highly public feud that’s developed between the director and his two gifted young stars, the objections of Julie Maroh-who wrote the graphic novel on which the movie is based-and the MPAA’s predictable choice to assign the film an NC-17 rating. ![]() Forget, if you can, the post-Cannes hullaballoo surrounding the film’s hotly debated gender politics. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |