695 Blue is the Warmest Color

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tojoed
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Re: 695 Blue Is the Warmest Color

#76 Post by tojoed » Sat Nov 16, 2013 8:52 am

domino harvey wrote:No way, this is an ingenious way to screw over the collectionistas and for that we should all applaud Criterion
I love this word "collectionistas", we should use it more often for all types with the collector mentality.

peerpee
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#77 Post by peerpee » Sat Nov 16, 2013 2:39 pm

Obsesssive collectors will collect both barebones and SE, and the barebones editions will eventually become collectible because they'll be deleted after 6-9 months. It's a win win.

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manicsounds
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#78 Post by manicsounds » Sat Nov 16, 2013 7:40 pm

Plus, if the special edition is to contain a longer director's cut, possibly this initial edition will be the only way to see the theatrical.

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ptatler
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#79 Post by ptatler » Sun Nov 17, 2013 2:47 pm

Not sure if anyone else had posted this yet, via CC's PR engine:
Orange Media Relations wrote:Blue Is the Warmest Color is clearly one of 2013’s major movie sensations. After winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer, the explicit, discussion-provoking French drama about a young woman’s sexual awakening has opened to big box office in the U.S. and Europe. And we’re thrilled to announce that this beautifully made cinematic lightning rod is entering the Criterion Collection in February. The film has been swept up in controversy from the moment of its premiere in Cannes and has kicked off a national discussion about gender identity and young sexuality. In light of this, Criterion has taken the unusual step of introducing the film in lower-priced, unadorned, movie-only DVD and Blu-ray editions, to make the film available as soon as possible. A full-priced, dual-format special edition will replace this preliminary edition at a later date to be announced.

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zedz
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#80 Post by zedz » Sun Nov 17, 2013 3:20 pm

manicsounds wrote:Plus, if the special edition is to contain a longer director's cut, possibly this initial edition will be the only way to see the theatrical.
That would actually be sensible on Criterion's part.

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Jeff
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#81 Post by Jeff » Fri Nov 29, 2013 8:32 pm

What a remarkable, complete performance by Adèle Exarchopoulos. No pun intended, this is a fully fleshed-out character, who discovers who she is over the course of what must be the fastest three hours I've spent in a cinema. Discovering who she is doesn't necessarily mean coming to terms with her sexuality, as I don't think Adèle ever quite has a firm grasp on that. She deals with issues of class, education, art, culture, economics, companionship, and passion -- all of which collide for her in a cacophony of senses that she wrestles with in a tremendous, emotionally convincing performance. It's a shame that the film's public perception has become all about its on-set controversy and its graphic sexuality. Yes, it's something of a novelty to see two very naked women exploring each others' bodies so graphically onscreen for such an extended time period, but if anything, those are the scenes I would have trimmed. They go from titillating to tedious pretty quickly, though I get that Kechiche wants us to appreciate the intense desire that Adèle feels for another human being for the first time.

If Kechiche is guilty of leering at these actresses bodies, he is at least as guilty of leering at their food. As with The Secret of the Grain, Kechiche is enamored with what people eat, its place in social situations, its symbolism. A teenage Adèle and a male classmate flirt awkwardly al fresco while stuffing their faces with fat gyros. Adèle's bourgeois parents seem content with spaghetti bolognese, which they have on two occasions in the film, even when entertaining Léa Seydoux's Emma (while Emma's far more adventurous family serves Adèle raw oysters and good wine). The spaghetti returns when Adèle prepares it for Emma's cultured, worldly, bohemian friends. It may be the only culinary relic of her sheltered adolescence, though she's now mastered some sort of fried dumpling too.

I could easily spend another three hours with Adèle, lingering over her social interactions, her arguments, her work, and her discovery of the world around her. Despite Kechiche's predilections, digressions, and fascinations, the film is not about who or what Adèle is eating; it's a story about a very real coming-of-age, and it's one of the best.

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Satori
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#82 Post by Satori » Sat Nov 30, 2013 9:52 am

Ah, here is where the conversation about this film is! I finally saw this and was going to post about it but I couldn't find the thread in new films!
If Kechiche is guilty of leering at these actresses bodies, he is at least as guilty of leering at their food.
Absolutely. I think critics making a big deal about the sex scenes forget how physical and tactile the entire film is. The mise-en-scene is obsessed with Adèle's chewing, touching, and movements. Almost everything is shot in closeup. At its best, the film makes us feel along with Adèle; there is almost no critical distance; there is only affect. Blue is all about what Deleuze calls hapticity, or film's synaesthesia between vision and touch. The sex scenes need to be there because the film is about Adèle's bodily affect. So the sex scenes were the complete opposite of something like Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle, which I'm pretty sure is the only other non-porn film with such a lengthy lesbian sex scene. But I honestly think critics of this film should take more seriously the knee jerk comparisons to porn- if the whole point of porn is to produce erotic connections through the film/spectator assemblage, why shouldn't Kechiche draw on these techniques? The first sex scene between Adèle and Emma in particular seems to utilize some standard porn mise-en-scene features, especially the way in which it cuts up their bodies through editing and its use of close ups on specific body parts- we get rapid cuts moving from position to position, body part to body part, until at the end they are a tangled mess of intertwined limbs. It is such a fleshy, erotic scene. But I think the key is that (unlike with most porn) we are already so emotionally connected with Adèle that we don't experience the scene as an observer, but rather along with her. The whole film does this- I was an emotional wreck for about three days after I saw it because of how powerful this identification with Adèle was. Honestly, I wanted some critical distance, I wanted the film to be about politics, I wanted it to explore questions of sexual identity and class, because then I could have a standpoint independent of the film's emotions. But the film denied that because its point is to produce affect and tell its story through powerful emotional connections. The film made me uncomfortable; unless I write about the film, I doubt I'll ever watch the last hour again. And I absolutely mean that as the highest compliment to what Kechiche has accomplished.

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Kirkinson
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#83 Post by Kirkinson » Tue Dec 03, 2013 7:34 am

After griping about Kechiche's alleged behavior earlier in this thread, I thought it would be good to come back after finally seeing it to say that, whatever did or did not transpire on set, this is a wonderful, deeply affecting film in almost every respect, shot and edited with a bold, proximal regard for beauty and passion, with a truly extraordinary performance by Exarchopoulos as its center. Léa Seydoux is perfect as well, of course, but it's really Adèle's movie, and it's her character whose inner journey is really unfolding on screen, up close and rawly personal.
Satori wrote:Honestly, I wanted some critical distance, I wanted the film to be about politics, I wanted it to explore questions of sexual identity and class, because then I could have a standpoint independent of the film's emotions. But the film denied that because its point is to produce affect and tell its story through powerful emotional connections.
I know just what you mean, but I have to say that one of the things that impressed me most about this film was how much it actually does cover all of these subjects, but it approaches them entirely through Adèle's emotional response to them. The issues of class difference were the most interesting to me. The way Adèle is first forced to navigate the very different social world Emma and her parents inhabit, and then the difficult experience of feeling lost and uncultivated in the midst of her art-world friends who all appear to be better-educated (regardless of whether or not that's true), all hit pretty close to home for me. I don't think this is really a spoiler, but:
SpoilerShow
I thought this became especially interesting in the climactic argument when Emma asked Adèle if she was ashamed to be with a woman, since she was not out to her colleagues. It's easy to see why Emma would find this hurtful, but I think it also reveals something of the ways in which she is insenstive to Adèle's background and social environment. Emma lives in a world where being out as a lesbian is relatively risk-free, socially and professionally, whereas Adèle lives in a less predictably liberal, more potentially hostile world where the revelation of her sexual identity (which is not so clearly definable in the first place) could have serious consequences for her job and her social status.
Of course it's true these issues are never dealt with head-on, since, as Satori put it, this film tells its story through its emotional connections, and the film's purpose is to portray the grander emotional journey Adèle travels. But the way that emotional journey includes all of these social questions and deals with how the characters are affected by them is one of the things that makes it so rich and rewarding.

Unfortunately, I found the infamous sex scenes highly detrimental to everything else the film had going for it (though to be fair they might not figure so prominently in my judgment if they hadn't already been written about so exhaustively). I understand Kechiche's reasons for including them, as sex is as much a part of the story of this couple as anything else included in the film, and the erotic desire and satisfaction that Adèle feels with Emma is meant to be something special and unique, at least in terms of her experience up to the beginning of this relationship. But I felt the execution of these scenes was very lacking, and stylistically at odds with the rest of the film. In terms of set design, shot choice, and especially lighting, the sex scenes that take place in Emma's room are stagy and emotionally distant. Where most of the film is raw, intimate, and organic, these scenes are more blunt, blank, and mechanical. While I wouldn't say they are no different than porn, I think I can understand why one might feel that way, as these scenes have something very impersonal about them, a strong sense of two people who barely know each other simply "going through the motions," albeit with strongly forced enthusiasm. Satori above makes a reasonable case for why it might not be inappropriate for Kechiche to draw on pornographic techniques (and he's spot-on about the film's overall "hapticity") but perhaps that's part of my problem, as pornography has rarely ever done anything for me. But on the other hand, I found a great deal of the rest of the film highly erotic, so those scenes still feel very much like outliers to me. Their failure is further emphasized by the much more effective sex scene that comes later, after the first time that Emma visits Adèle's family home. That was the only physically intimate scene in which I felt like I was really watching the same two characters from the rest of the film, and the first time we see them making love that really conveyed the same kind of visceral and emotional desire so well captured everywhere else. It seems a shame that so much of the press and word of mouth about this richly beautiful and varied film has revolved around what was for me its single weakest point.

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Jeff
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#84 Post by Jeff » Wed Dec 04, 2013 12:31 am

Agree with Kirkinson 100% on the sex scenes. I was having trouble describing my issue with them, but he did it perfectly. I dearly love this movie, but man do those scenes feel out of place. Almost like they came from a different film. As he said, they're so brightly lit and stagey, they're almost clinical. So this is a great coming-of-age film occasionally interrupted by some overlong, discordant sex scenes. 90% of the film is wonderful. I think I've entered some sort of reverse pubescence; when I get this on Blu-ray, I'll be fast-forwarding through the scenes of naked girls to get back to the movie!

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Luke M
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#85 Post by Luke M » Thu Jan 09, 2014 8:45 pm

Finally saw this today, had an ass-slappin' good time!

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manicsounds
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#86 Post by manicsounds » Mon Jan 27, 2014 8:25 am


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hearthesilence
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#87 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Jan 27, 2014 10:50 am

I have to say, I was kind of shocked how cheap the sex scenes looked. The lighting looks horrible, like something out of a cheap student film. "Well lit" in that you can see everything, but it looked really bad. This is especially apparent in either the second or third sex scene, which is sandwiched between two scenes where the former was done in the dining room at night and the latter began in a dim hallway in the daytime, and in both cases, it was shaped as if they were filmed in available light. (i.e. they simulated the "natural" look of those settings)

And even the compositions were occasionally problematic - I'm thinking specifically of the poor medium shots that honestly seemed like you were just sitting and watching them from a chair plopped in the room rather than a shot that empathized in whatever passion was being felt by the two characters.

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greggster59
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#88 Post by greggster59 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 10:52 am

manicsounds wrote:blu-ray.com
Good review. But, they fail to mention this is a bare bones release.

From the Criterion Collection website: A full special edition treatment of this film will follow at a later date.

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mfunk9786
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#89 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 11:52 am

They mention the extras that are on the disc, and give the extras a 1/5. Do they need to come out and say "This disc is barebones."?

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#90 Post by jindianajonz » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:17 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:They mention the extras that are on the disc, and give the extras a 1/5. Do they need to come out and say "This disc is barebones."?
I think he was implying that they should mention the forthcoming special edition as a coutesy so people don't accidentally double dip.

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greggster59
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#91 Post by greggster59 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:37 pm

jindianajonz wrote:
mfunk9786 wrote:They mention the extras that are on the disc, and give the extras a 1/5. Do they need to come out and say "This disc is barebones."?
I think he was implying that they should mention the forthcoming special edition as a coutesy so people don't accidentally double dip.
Correct. Sorry if that wasn't immediately clear.
This is the first Criterion release that I can think of where they are setting up the double dip. It would be helpful if this was mentioned in the reviews.

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#92 Post by jindianajonz » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:57 pm

greggster59 wrote:This is the first Criterion release that I can think of where they are setting up the double dip.
I tricked myself into buying Bergman Island, not realizing it was included on the Seventh Seal disc.

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#93 Post by movielocke » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:57 pm

hearthesilence wrote:I have to say, I was kind of shocked how cheap the sex scenes looked. The lighting looks horrible, like something out of a cheap student film. "Well lit" in that you can see everything, but it looked really bad. This is especially apparent in either the second or third sex scene, which is sandwiched between two scenes where the former was done in the dining room at night and the latter began in a dim hallway in the daytime, and in both cases, it was shaped as if they were filmed in available light. (i.e. they simulated the "natural" look of those settings)

And even the compositions were occasionally problematic - I'm thinking specifically of the poor medium shots that honestly seemed like you were just sitting and watching them from a chair plopped in the room rather than a shot that empathized in whatever passion was being felt by the two characters.
I felt like the brightly lit sex scenes were meant to contrast to the typical 'romantique' sex scenes of soft lighting at night and blurry focus. It felt like a specific rejection of how most sex scenes are done in feature films. I also thought the bright wide shots established a contrast (at least in setting and light) from the cramped, almost claustrophobic windowless space where she has sex with the guy early in the film. iirc those brief shots are all from higher up looking down on adele, whereas the sex scene with emma is primarily shot on adele's level, not looking down on them, but with them, looking at each other.

I feel like the open, bright space of the first sex scene with emma also illustrates adele's ecstatic mental state at experiencing sex that feels right for the first time, how she's freed by this experience, it's not one confined to the night or dark. Ironically, she remains closeted, rather than coming out.

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Black Hat
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#94 Post by Black Hat » Mon Jan 27, 2014 4:39 pm

Is there any sense of when Criterion will be releasing the full edition?

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#95 Post by criterion10 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 6:36 pm

And, more importantly, will it include the director's cut that Abdellatif Kechiche hinted towards at one point?

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mfunk9786
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#96 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 11:13 pm

Forty-five more minutes of schoolteaching scenes!

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Oedipax
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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#97 Post by Oedipax » Thu Jan 30, 2014 3:30 am

I'm quietly astonished that on this of all films, Gary elected to not include any topless screengrabs in the DVD Beaver review. :)

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#98 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Jan 30, 2014 12:55 pm

I think he's been trying to appear more respectable by avoiding the topless shots. When I first started checking out DVDBeaver, it did seem a bit trashy that if there was half a second of nipple in the film, it was sure to make the DVDBeaver screencaps.

I can't say I'm too disappointed at this change, since I tend to check these things while I'm working, and I'm always afraid that somebody will walk by an an inopportune time. I was checking out different versions of various David Lynch films yesterday on their site, and Gary sure didn't steer away from nudity when he compiled those!

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#99 Post by jbeall » Thu Jan 30, 2014 2:31 pm

Oedipax wrote:I'm quietly astonished that on this of all films, Gary elected to not include any topless screengrabs in the DVD Beaver review. :)
The third-to-last screengrab has a nipple in it

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Re: 695 Blue is the Warmest Color

#100 Post by adavis53 » Fri Jan 31, 2014 8:21 pm

did the release for this get pushed back? the criterion website currently has it listed as the 25th of February, but i previously thought it was coming out the 11th as reported by criterionforum.

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