Abdellatif Kechiche
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Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Themes Visuals
Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous film “Black Venus” was also controversial in regard to the treatment of his leading lady, combines the subject matter of the new wave landmark “The 400 Blows” with the notoriety of “Last Tango in Paris.”
Bernardo Bertolucci became famous for his on-set trickery and emotional abuse; Maria Schneider said she felt as if she had been raped after the famous anal-sex scene with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.”
In short, there are—as Spielberg, of all people, will have noticed—more traces of Truffaut here than there are of “Last Tango in Paris.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
influenced by Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Themes Visuals
Portrait of a Lady on Fire never becomes graphic, especially compared to the controversial Blue is the Warmest Color , but the erotic nature of their relationship cannot be ignored.
As someone with Blue is the Warmest Color barely carving out a spot on my top 50 of the decade list I plan on sharing sometime in December, Portrait of a Lady on Fire challenges me to rethink the authenticity of that film regardless of how powerful I found it to be.
Films such as Blue is the Warmest Color and Disobedience deliver just that through prolonged sex scenes that are borderline pornographic and weak storytelling.
In fact, she is so deliberate in her “Portrait” that one cannot ignore the filmmaker’s oblique opposition to the cold and soft-core sex scenes of "Blue is the Warmest Color," another love story of the recent LGBTQ canon, but one shot from the unfortunate POV of the male gaze (an admittedly overused but fitting term here.)
Only Call Me by Your Name and Blue is the Warmest Color have been as successful in finding the specific queerness in their initial attraction, perfectly balancing tepid hesitation with unrelinquished excitement within their shared kinship as “others.”
Even then, the payoff for all the film’s sexual tension proves to be largely intellectual, expressed primarily through words rather than the kind of torrid lovemaking scenes Cannes witnessed with “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
The few truly erotic scenes in movies—such as Alan Bates and Jennie Linden in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), Bates and Oliver Reed’s nude wrestling match in the same film, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)—capture the abandonment and essence of the events, not the mechanics and certainly not for seven minutes.
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Directed by Stephen Frears
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
The few truly erotic scenes in movies—such as Alan Bates and Jennie Linden in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), Bates and Oliver Reed’s nude wrestling match in the same film, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)—capture the abandonment and essence of the events, not the mechanics and certainly not for seven minutes.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Plot
Kechiche signals his aspirations toward the epic by borrowing Lawrence of Arabia's bifurcated structure and throws in a spaghetti-dinner homage to Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence to tip off just how far we're going to fall.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Directed by David Lean
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Plot Visuals
Kechiche signals his aspirations toward the epic by borrowing Lawrence of Arabia's bifurcated structure and throws in a spaghetti-dinner homage to Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence to tip off just how far we're going to fall.
It’s arthouse spectacle of the first order, shot across a widescreen canvas more associated with Lawrence Of Arabia’s trek through the African desert, and equally scaled in its emotional register.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Visuals
The last movie I saw with this many close-ups was The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and it was supposed to be suffocating.
During a (chapter two) dinner party at Emma and Adèle’s home, the guests appear against an outdoor movie screen that shows Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1928), yet another effort to explain and also to worry about an unknowable woman; Adèle and her guests listen to Joachim (Stéphane Mercoyrol), a gallery owner whose favor may be instrumental in Emma’s career going forward.
Those who have true sensitivity deeply despise this movie, so absurd and offensive as having made Ingrid Bergman fucking during 15 minutes in "Casablanca" (I don't need to see it to understand their passion, so why with Adele and Emma we need to see seven orgasms to "understand" their desire and passion?
Wasn’t that already a stale trope by 1963, when Albert Finney and Joyce Redman slithered through their gastronomic duel in “Tom Jones”?
Queen Christina (1934)
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Visuals
(For once, you wouldn’t mind a sequel here, as that final, intriguing shot of her has a modern resonance to match that of the famous last frame of Garbo's Queen Christina.)
Without doubt, this is Western cinema 's most mature and assured performance by a teenage actress since Sandrine Bonnaire 's award-winning work in "A Nos Amours" and "Vagabond" 30 years ago.
Without doubt, this is Western cinema 's most mature and assured performance by a teenage actress since Sandrine Bonnaire 's award-winning work in "A Nos Amours" and "Vagabond" 30 years ago.
A few decades before, a movie like Making Love (where a doctor, Michael Ontkean, falls in love with a patient played by Harry Hamlin) was seen as brave and audacious.
Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by the Tunisian-French auteur Abdellatif Kechiche, and based on a graphic novel called Blue Angel (“Le Bleu est une couleur chaude”), ‘Blue”‘s Cannes award was, in a rare move, presented to both the director and the two lead actresses.
Ammonite (2020)
Directed by Francis Lee
influenced by Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Themes Visuals
For those expecting the sumptuous passions of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) or the anguished romance and sexual expressiveness of Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), then Ammonite may seem to miss the mark of our growing expectations of romantic lesbian representation, both period or otherwise.
The sex scenes, although far from the graphic level of Blue Is the Warmest Color, are sufficiently explicit to convey the intensity of feelings experienced.
Bravo to Lee for showing sex scenes betweem them that are explicit and unflinching much like in Blue is the Warmest Color, but, most importantly, it's the unflinching emotions of the film that enriches it the most.
The sex scene is “Blue is the Warmest Color” explicit, so explicit that it’s the centerpiece of the film and considering how little we learn of the women’s lives and the state of the science, basically its entire reason for existing.
Is Lee simply a male ally to lesbians, or is that image just another instance of masculine exploitation, like Abellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color ?
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Themes
A contemporary riff on “La Dolce Vita,” among other cinematic and literary touchstones, it stars a fantastic Toni Servillo as Jep Gambardella, a Rome journalist.
By focusing on Adèle’s turbulent obsession with Emma, Blue comes close to earning the commendation that Lionel Trilling bestowed on another controversial work, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: that it “is not about sex, but about love … This makes it unique in my experience of contemporary novels.”
Carol has some obvious narrative parallels to Abdellatif Kechiche’s undeserved Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color.
It is an intimate moment as far removed from the extensive sex sequence in Blue is the Warmest Color .
BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017)
Directed by Robin Campillo
influenced by Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Visuals
The intimacy Campillo displays in the sex scenes is groundbreaking for an LGBT film and recalls the similarly lengthy and explicit sequences of 2013’s Palme d’Or-winning Blue is the Warmest Color .