The radical notion that women like good movies
The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.
It’s fantastic that there is a “Blue is the Warmest Color” comic book French film adaptation that is receiving such praise. Not only that, but the graphic novel was written and drawn by a woman, Julie Maroh. However, because I really admire the graphic novel source material (…even though it is a bit overwrought…I mean, hey, what love story isn’t?), I feel compelled to critique the film for the myriad changes that were actively made from comic to screenplay, which remove much of the drama and complexity from the storyline.
A three-hour art film about two queer women with subtitles is like a dream come true for me: I’ve sat through arty, subtitled films twice that long–which didn’t have a trace of queer content. So I’ve obsessively read everything I can about Blue Is The Warmest Color. And I’m puzzled. In an age when writers of color like Wesley Morris and Roxane Gay bring added perspective and insight to their reviews of films like, Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave, why are straight men the overwhelming majority of people telling the world whether or not the sex scenes in Blue are convincing?
Written by Rachel Redfern Film poster for Blue is the Warmest Color Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color is the first film with a lesbian protagonist to win the prestigious Palm D’or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The French drama is based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel and centers on the life of … Continue reading “The Titillating Nature of Sex: Controversy in ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’”
Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated ‘Transparent’ I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it.
Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated ‘Transparent’ I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it.
Check out all of the posts from our Women Directors Theme Week here.
The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.
The potency of ‘Carol’ struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. … The film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times.
If only ‘Carol’ the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘The Price of Salt’) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion.
Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and ‘Transparent’) which explains why we now have ‘The Danish Girl’ in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.
The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in ‘Full Metal Jacket.’
