In late September, Kechiche told the French magazine Télérama that the outrage had “sullied” the film for future audiences now the public would wonder whether he’d harassed the exquisite starlets. Seydoux, who plays Emma, said she felt like a “prostitute.” Exarchopoulos described a “horrible” continuous take in which Seydoux hit her over and over, leaving her raw. The French union representing the film industry spoke of deplorable conditions for the crew. Then, later in summer, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos said that the shooting had been unbearable and they would never again work with Kechiche. Kechiche,” as Manohla Dargis wrote, you wouldn’t have known: the red carpet was witness to a symphony of happy symmetry as the established Léa Seydoux, twenty-eight, and the newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos, nineteen, flanked their director and kissed him. If this “ took some auteur sheen away from Mr. “Three artists,” Spielberg said that May day. The 2013 Cannes jury, presided over by Steven Spielberg, awarded the top prize not only to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, but to the lead actresses, too. Force and firepower, Anthony Lane writes in his review of the film in the magazine this week, that amounts to “a fusillade of cries and clutches, grabs and slaps-a pitch of pleasure so entwined with desperation that we find ourselves not in the realm of the pornographic but on the brink of romantic agony.” “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” in French “La Vie d’Adèle-Chapitres 1 et 2,” shows some of the more potent and torrid sex scenes in popular memory: sex scenes between two women, one lasting seven intimate minutes.
This exchange between the two, whose ardors we follow over years, mirrors a debate being hashed out over the film. “Beaux-Arts?” Adèle, always hungry, wants to know. Emma replies that she studies at the École des Beaux-Arts.
When the chance at conversation arises, Adèle asks Emma, somewhat mechanically, what she does. Adèle, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, has already spotted Emma, a blue-haired sparkplug, on the street, and pleasured herself to thoughts of her. In “ Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, our brightly burning heroines first meet in a lesbian bar in Lille.