Kechiche's Blue is More About Cultural Chasms than Sexual Preference

 

 

 

This film is based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel "Le bleu est une couleur chaude."  Watching this 2013 film (Blue is the Warmest Color) is like drinking water from a fire hose !  There is so much to take in on the first viewing.  Be it the mesmerizing yet sloppy beauty of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulus), who was encouraged by the director to improvise lines.  Be it the extraordinarily sensual nature of the film in endless close-ups.  Be it the 10-minute long sex scene that is so un-Hollywood (1 minute max is typical formula) in its mimicry of real life, it is not choreographed (which typically desexualizes the act).  Be it the rich French literary references to Sartre, Francis Ponge and Pierre de Marivaux.  Be it the uncanny improbable ability of a French-Tunisian male director (Abdellatif Kechiche) to explore the nuances of a same-sex relation transpiring over 3 hours.  Be it the ambivalent final scene, with implications that heterosexuality is better (or not).   

 

Unusually, the director and both actresses each were awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May, 2013.  They were the only women (besides Jane Campion for The Piano, 1993) to win this award, based on their role as "auteurs" (see Sullivan in Agnesfilms.com).  The film is replete with controversy.  Women claim that Kechiche betrays a fetishism in his male gaze, it is a male view of "lesbian" sex.  Kechiche titled his adaption "La Vie d'Adèle" in France, rather than the title of Maroh's graphic novel "le bleu est une couleur chaude."  Some claim he was obsessed with the actress and her buttocks, a frequent subject of the camera.  And sexism is alive in the butch-femme relation as Adèle plays housewife to Emma.  Also the media obsession with prosthetic vulvas on the actresses, was it real sex or not ?  Does the homophobia exhibited by Adèle's classmates elevate the film's message to one of militant lesbianism ?

 

The Life of Marianne by Marivaux is significant as it is about the anticipation of desire.  Marianne own experience of love at first sight becomes the object lesson in the classroom scene.  Adèle takes it to heart.  Adèle's unsatisfying heterosexual effort with Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte, who became her real-life boyfriend) and her encounter with a female classmate represent transitional steps in an awakening.  Sartre's Being & Nothingness can inform the debate: are these two women just lovers or are they Lesbians ?  Sullivan opines that being lesbian has its own negation, its own "nothingness."  Kechiche prefers to consider the pair as simply "being."  To name the women lesbians would be making a militant statement.  It is like any other love story with no sexual politics.  The actresses share this philosophy with the director.  Note that during the shoot, France was experiencing violent gay rights protests.  Same-sex marriage became legal in France May, 2013.  An historical antecedent is in the film: note Louise Brooks in a silent film playing at Léa's party: Brooks was well known for her bisexual dalliances, including Greta Garbo.

 

Some may view the film as a tale of obsession.  Swedish pop star Lykke Li's club hit "I Follow Rivers" is featured in the birthday party scene.  On an interview this is what she said about the song 'I Follow Rivers'..."It's about lust and obsession and infatuation. Infatuation is something very different from love, it's a craving, it's very animalistic so it's about you crave something whether its drugs or it's this love that is really bad for you, it's gonna hurt you but you still want to go there so it's like 'I'll follow you wherever you may take me' and it's a very dark, doom place.. you know it's like a river, like you can't hold back once you jump in."

 

In the final analysis,  Adèle cannot sustain her lustful relation with Emma (Léa Seydoux, granddaughter of the Chairman of Pathé) because of irreconcilable class differences, Adèle from a blue collar family in Lille and Léa a sophisticated intellectual and artist.  It is telling that her voluptuous mouth is featured eating junk food and pasta, not just kissing.  The differences that at first were points of attraction soon polarize the relation.  In fact, Emma becomes very exploitative in the relation.  The film ends years later as Adèle visits Emma at a gallery opening and bumps into her Arab buddy Samir.  The two reunited working class heroes exchange bios.  In the final scene Samir goes after Adèle without finding her.  Ironically, the final shot features Samir, suggesting a political awakening in a film sequel.

 

Kechiche accumulated more than 700 hours of film.  The film was shot chronologically, in order to capture more realistically the growing passion and tension between the actresses.  French Unions revealed that the film violated French labor laws with more than 8-hour days.  Kechiche was prepared to drop sex scenes for the censors, but the distributor Wild Bunch wouldn't have it.

 

Brooklyn Castle Cerebral Mr. Holland's Opus

 

Mr. Holland's Opus (1995) is presented as a biography of the 30-year career of the eponymous lead character, Glenn Holland, a music teacher at the fictional John F. Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon.

 

Brooklyn Castle (2012) is a documentary film about Intermediate School 318 (101 Walton St.), an inner-city public school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, where an after-school chess program, having both dedicated educators and a supportive community, has triumphed over deep budget cuts to build the most winning junior high school chess team in the country, and the first middle school team to win the United States Chess Federation's national high school championship.

 

The similarities of these two films are striking and are a testimonial to the human spirit.

Jep has "More Than a Feeling" in The Great Beauty

 

Neapolitan director Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty (2013) is about a wealthy sybarite, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a city (Rome), and a country (Italy).  It is also a tribute to Italian cinema.  The unflattering and grotesque characters lack a sense of purpose.  Yet they populate a city with extraordinary beauty, which they could not replicate today. 

 

The occasion is Jep's 65th birthday.  He learns that his first love has died.  While hoofing around Rome he has numerous flashbacks including a scene where Elisa (Annaluisa Campasa) confronts him as a young man near the beach, exposing her teenage breasts and walking away. 

 

This film is loaded with beautiful music, sacred and profane.  Sacred includes:

 

1) the opening vocal "I Lie" composed by David Lang, performed by Torino Vocalesemble, with lyrics in Yiddish by Joseph Rolnick, at the church of San Pietro on the Janiculum hill. 

 

2) John Tavener and William Blake's "The Lamb," performed by the Choir of the Temple Church is also noteworthy. 

 

3) Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 known as "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," III Movement called the Lento - Cantabile Semplice which features a soprano.

 

4) "Dies Irae" by Zbigniew Preisner

 

5) "Beata viscera," c. 1200 - Magister Perotinus & Jan Garbarek

 

Profane includes Bob Sinclar & Raffaella Carra "Far L'Amore," which opens the party.

 

Yet the music that filled my head was the glorious vocal by Brad Delp (no falsetto he), lead singer for the band Boston, remembering Marianne, walking away in "More Than a Feeling."  Yes Jep, this is the tune that should be the voice inside your head !

 

 

Brad Delp is an amazing singer and his ever rising tenor in "More Than a Feeling" is legendary, ultimately hitting E (660 Hz) above high C (tenor C or C₅ is 525 Hz) on the line ending in "slipped away."

More Than a Feeling

I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walkin' away

So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet I still recall as I wander on
As clear as the sun in the summer sky

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away
I see my Marianne walkin' away

When I'm tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
I closed my eyes and she slipped away
She slipped away

It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Till I see Marianne walk away

Inside Llewyn Davis Echoes Humboldt's Gift

 

The Coen brothers have made a film about a folk singer Llewyn Davis, based on Dave Van Ronk's posthumous memoir "The Mayor of Macdougal Street" (2005).  He is but a footnote in the history of American popular music (NYT, 12/8/13).

 

Dylan, Rotolo, Van Ronk in 1963

 Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (1975) contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature.  The character Von Humboldt Fleisher is based on the life of Delmore Schwartz, a Jewish-American poet who lived and died in Brooklyn.  Humboldt published an avant-garde poetry book in the 1930s, he dies of a heart attack in the 1960s. 

  

 

When viewing Inside Llewyn Davis I could not help notice the parallels with Humboldt's Gift.  Both Van Ronk and Schwartz were second rate artists surviving in an era that would end in an explosion of post-1950s talent, notably Bob Dylan and the British wave in music and authors like Mailer, Bellow, Roth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon in literature.

 

Chilean Evangilism-Teenage Sex Train Wreck in Young and Wild

 

Rivas and Rodriguez

 

Chilean director Marialy Rivas' coming of age film Young and Wild (2012) examines the friction inherent in evangelical religion (18% of Chile is evangelical Christian) and teenage sexuality, odd bed fellows in the least.  Young & Wild is the name of the blog by narrator Daniela (Alicia Rodriguez), an 18-year old riddled with boundaries in post-Pinochet Chile.  Her blog is her salvation as she parses through an emotional morass of teen sexuality.  The film is based on the true sexual escapades of Chilean blogger, Camila Gutierrez.

 

Working at a religious TV station, she finds herself at the center of a love triangle involving a boyfriend, Tomás (played by Felipe Pinto), and her free-spirited female coworker, Antonia (María Gracia Omegna).

Perfunctory Asperger's Symptoms Abound in Attenberg

 

 

 

Attenberg (2010), an "anthropological" drama, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari and filmed in the seaside town of Aspra Spitia, in the Greek region of Boeotia, follows 23-year-old Marina (Ariane Labed), an unpredictable creature whose isolated habitat and limited human interaction have led her to mimic the repetitive behavior of animals featured in the Sir David Attenborough documentaries. Viewers may immediately associate Asperger's Syndrome (the singer Susan Boyle and the Newtown killer Adam Lanza) with her emotionally bereft and aloof behavior.  Her world is shaped by her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), whose health is decaying and her promiscuous friend Bella (Evangelia Randou).  Ultimately, she has an unemotional sexual tryst (Giorgos Lanthimos, who btw, is the director of Dogtooth and Alps), yet there is tenderness in the series of encounters, despite their perfunctory animalistic/clinical flavor, with the nakedness mimicking the apes in the jungle. 

In one memorable scene (see poster), attempting to open up to Bella, Marina removes her shirt, exposing her shoulder blades, which she begins to pop in and out of joint. It’s a freakish confessional, and it encapsulates the core of the film: it’s one thing to hear someone describe herself as double-jointed, another to see it in practice.

Just as in the Attenborough TV documentary with the gorillas, the relations in her life are unemotional.  Inevitably, her father dies, and the cremation process is equally devoid of emotion.  The functional process of packing him off to Germany to be cremated (cremation is legal in Greece and has been since 2006, but is still frowned upon by the Orthodox Christian church there) pulls her back into a world that is hard and cold and stark. She stands and watches his coffin packaged, x-rayed for the flight, marked with "THIS WAY UP" stickers like some Amazon or eBay parcel.

In an interview at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival, Tsangari states "I'm a big fan of combining things that are not readily combinable."  After all, that is the basis of this blog.