
WATCH BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR LOVE SCENE MOVIE
Some critics decided that I was really complaining about pornography, which was surprising because, while the movie uses some of that genre’s conventions, it’s clear that the sex was pantomimed. I received flak for my comments, which was unsurprising because I had criticized a movie that other people love, raising questions about pleasure and a director whose desire felt more at stake than that of his characters. Is Adèle, I had wondered then, dreaming of her own hot body? 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, he seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face.

Kechiche’s representation of the female body. Kechiche was a self-indulgent filmmaker (the movie runs three hours), and mentioned a scene in which a man talks about art and female orgasms. I first saw “Blue Is the Warmest Color” at Cannes, where I wrote 399 dissenting words on the movie and raised some of the issues I had with it. So I watch, loving movies that don’t necessarily love or even like women. The truth is, if I were hung up about every predatory director or every degrading image of a woman, I couldn’t be a film critic. For the most part, this information doesn’t factor into my thinking about these filmmakers, even if it is unsettling to hear Tippi Hedren brand Hitchcock as a sexual predator.

Mind you, I thought the same about Mike Nichols, given the attention he lavished on Natalie Portman’s rear in his 2004 film, “Closer.” This observation was a data point that I stashed in my files, where I’ve also noted that Alfred Hitchcock preferred blondes, and Quentin Tarantino likes pretty feet. The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, I realized fairly quickly, likes a tight end. It is a lovely derrière, no question, round, compact and firm, and I became well acquainted with how it looked whether tucked into snug jeans or perched prettily in the air when Adèle, who’s 15 when the movie opens, lies splayed sleeping face down in bed, as young children often do. Specifically, it was the way the camera captured the pretty teenager’s rear end in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” so that it was centered and foregrounded in the frame. It was her derrière that first caught my eye.
