Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is the Warmest Color"

I’ve yet to read a review that does full justice to Abdellatif Kechiche’s brilliant Blue Is the Warmest Color. Lorrie Moore, in her “Gazing at Love” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013), fails miserably. She says, “Girl meets girl. Girl loses girl. There’s not much else going on here for three hours.” Really? Since when is the depiction – in detail after inspired detail, close-up after intimate close-up – of a young woman’s initiation into a blazing relationship, the eventual flame-out and breakup of which pitches her into a desolation she may never recover from, “not much”? Anthony Lane, looking at those same three hours, said, “We are left wanting more” ("Blue Is the Warmest Color," newyorker.com). That’s exactly how I felt. I haven’t cared this much about a movie character’s fate in a long while. 

Merve Emre, in her excellent "Feeling Blue: On Abdellatif Kechiche's 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' " (Los Angeles Review of Books, October 25, 2013), says, “What’s extraordinary about Blue Is the Warmest Color is how through its particularity, the film makes Adèle’s blue bruised psyche sharply and essentially human.” Through its particularity – yes, that’s exactly how Kechiche does it. And he does it using Adèle’s face, too. Lane says, “The film is, to a compelling degree, the history of that face – tearful, sniffing, puffed with dismay, spotted and blotchy on a cold day, suddenly ravishing, and reddening in embarrassment or lust” ("New Love," The New Yorker, October 28, 2013). Even Moore agrees with this. She writes, “The close-ups of the young, still-forming face of Exarchopoulos show that the director knew precisely what he had when he cast her.” Moore is hung up on the film’s sex scenes. She writes,

From a narrative perspective the most perplexing problem with these sex scenes is that they mute and obscure the actresses, who otherwise, in many other parts of the film, offer their intelligent faces and voices to the screen in subtle and moving ways. In visual media the body is often deeply inexpressive compared to the heart’s great canvas—the face. The sex between these characters, as is true of most carnality, causes the interesting parts of these women’s personalities to recede.

I’m not sure Moore is right about this. Pauline Kael, in her classic review of Last Tango in Paris, wrote, “The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters drives” (“Tango,” Reeling, 1977). The same can be said about the sex in Blue Is the Warmest Color. On this point, I’ll let Anthony Lane have the last word:

The movie has gained a certain notoriety for its unabashed view of her sexual encounters; those desires, however, are not set apart like islands, but folded into the landscape of her life, more of which is probably spent in the classroom and the kitchen than in the bedroom.

Lane’s and Emre’s pieces are superb. But they lack the crackling excitement of Kael’s “Tango.” They’re a bit subdued. Maybe it’s no longer cool for critics to rave about movies the way Kael raved about Last Tango (“I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing”). Well, I’m not above raving about Blue Is the Warmest Color. It’s the most realistic character study I’ve ever seen. I can’t get it out of my system. To paraphrase Emre’s great closing line, Adèle’s truth has become mine: being without blue is no way to be.

March 10, 2014 Issue

There are two excellent political pieces in this week’s issue – Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” and Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal.” What makes them excellent is their high quotient of personal experience.

Hessler’s piece, a report on the current Egyptian situation, is drenched in experienced reality: his visit to the tense Police Academy courtroom, where members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including former President Mohamed Morsi, are on trial (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”); his escape from gunfire at a protest rally in Mohandiseen (“I was running on a bad foot – I had injured a ligament a few weeks before – and I slowed to a walk once I though we were out of range. But then I heard bird shot ripping through the leaves of a tree overhead, so I started running again”).

Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal,” about Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s plan to build a transoceanic canal, also features vivid experiential moments. Though not as existentially edgy as Hessler’s brush with gunfire, they make their point. For example, in a passage that serves to illustrate the vast economic gap between many impoverished Nicaraguans and the wily canal planners, Anderson writes,

In December, driving with a Nicaraguan companion along a dirt road in the backcountry, I stopped to offer a lift to an elderly woman, whose burnished skin suggested indigenous blood. She was wearing a long traditional dress, and she was moving slowly, with the help of a walking stick. When I asked if she wanted a ride, she thanked me, and said, “Some alms would be better, son.” I dug into my pocket for a hundred-cordoba note, worth about four American dollars. She looked at it bemusedly, and asked, “What is it?” Shocked, my companion tried to explain what paper money was. She looked quizzical, and kept on walking.

Passages like these, the basic stuff of reality, are what kept me reading Anderson’s and Hessler’s pieces. They stick to specifics and avoid abstractions. In this they're exceptional because, as Orwell pointed out, the whole tendency of political writing is “away from concreteness” (“Politics and the English Language”).

Postscript: A special shout-out to Richard Brody, editor of “Goings On About Town” ’s “Movies” department, for his inclusion of Pauline Kael’s Grand Hotel capsule review in this week’s issue. Kael is one of the all-time New Yorker greats. It’s a pleasure to see her work still appearing in the magazine.

Sundays With Updike: "A Case of Solicitude"

Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (1919)

I enjoy criticism that, in Nabokovian phrase, “caresses the details.” John Updike’s “A Case of Solicitude” (in his great 1989 collection Just Looking) is an excellent example. It’s an appreciation of Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (1919), which Updike beautifully describes as follows:

This woman is paler than most of her sisters in Modigliani’s oeuvre, where skin tends to be ruddy or golden. Her pallor flows like a river between the dark banks of the vaguely indicated coverings of her couch. Her elongated torso links two bulging masses, one of them her hips and the other a complicated close lumping of arms, breasts, and head; this long middle softly twists, for the triangle of pubic hair confronts us frontally, while her breasts are shown in three-quarter view, and her face in profile. Her profile is drawn upon her flesh with a fastidious black line, of which her eyebrow is a detached, floating arc. We savor and cherish the patches of pink that she holds in her hands (curled in sleep like those of a baby), and that tinge with a flush her cheeks and eyelid, and that mark her nipples. Without these rosy touches, her form might be too absolute.

That “We savor and cherish the patches of pink that she holds in her hands (curled in sleep like those of a baby), and that tinge with a flush her cheeks and eyelid, and that mark her nipples” is marvelously fine – looking conducted at a sublime level.

Updike’s intense focus on Modigliani’s “patches of pink” connects with his earlier “Gaiety in the Galleries” (The New Yorker, February 27, 1977; included in Updike’s 1983 collection Hugging the Shore), a brilliant review of Peter Gay’s Art and Act, in which he quotes André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence as follows:

Manet’s contribution, not superior but radically different, is the green of The Balcony, the pink patch of the wrap in Olympia, the touch of red behind the black bodice in the small Bar des Folies-Bergère…. [They] are obviously color-patches signifying nothing except color. Here the picture, whose background had been hitherto a recession, becomes a surface, and this surface becomes not merely an end in itself but the pictures raison d’être. Delacroix’s sketches, even the boldest, never went beyond dramatizations; Manet (in some of his canvases) treats the world as – uniquely – the stuff of pictures.

Updike goes on to say, “Malraux’s point about the patches of color offers a perspective, a thread through the tangle….” The same can be said about Updike’s observation regarding the “patches of pink” in Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. “A Case of Solicitude” not only expands our appreciation of a great painting; it provides insight into at least one source of Updike’s exquisite critical sensibility. 

March 3, 2014 Issue

Notes on two pieces in this week’s excellent issue:

1. Deborah Treisman’s absorbing obituary of Mavis Gallant led me back to Gallant’s wonderful Paris Notebooks (1986). Treisman’s mention of Gallant’s “lacerating observations of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, in which no one gets away unexamined” refers to Gallant’s brilliant two-part “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker (September 14 & 21, 1968), and was later collected in her Paris Notebooks. What an exhilarating piece of writing! It’s Gallant’s record of her firsthand impressions of the 1968 student revolts in Paris. It’s written in a style I relish – first-person, present-tense, collage-like, written-on-the-wing, using sentence fragments, bits of dialogue, quotation, comment, observation, description, hearsay, anything at hand to convey reality at the moment it’s being experienced. Here’s a quick taste of Gallant’s fluid, deeply immersive, totally addictive notation:

The ripped streets around the Luxembourg Station. People who live around here seem dazed. Stand there looking dazed. Paving torn up. The Rue Royer-Collard, where I used to live, looks bombed. Burned cars – ugly, gray-black. These are small cars, the kind you can lift and push around easily. Not the cars of the rich. It’s said that even the car owners haven’t complained, because they had watched the police charge from their windows. Armed men, and unarmed children. I used to think that that the young in France were all little aged men. Oh! We all feel sick. Rumor of two deaths, one a student, one a C.R.S. Rumor that a student had his throat cut “against a window at 24 Rue Gay-Lussac” – so a tract (already!) informs. They say it was the police incendiary grenades, and not the students, that set the cars on fire, but it was probably both. A friend of H.’s who lost his car found tracts still stuffed in it, half charred, used as kindling. Rumor that police beat the wounded with clubs, that people hid them (the students) and looked after them, and that police went into private homes. When the police threw the first tear-gas bombs, everyone in the houses nearby threw out basins of water to keep the gas close to the ground.

2. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle” is a masterpiece – in the same league as his extraordinary “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). How do you describe “the largest scientific collaboration in history”? Khatchadourian shows us, in detail after fascinating detail. The piece is about ITER – an audacious plan to build a new type of reactor, “a self-sustaining synthetic star,” based on nuclear fusion. It brims with amazing facts – ITER’s concrete foundation “must support three hundred and sixty thousand tons of equipment and infrastructure”; by the time it’s finished, ITER “will contain ten million individual parts”; “the sun is, essentially, a four-hundred-quintillion-megawatt thermonuclear power plant, fuelled by billions of years’ worth of hydrogen”; the Airfloat pallet on which an airplane fuselage or a locomotive slides “like a shopping cart”; ITER’s magnetic fields will create forces that can reach “sixty meganewtons, or twice the thrust that a NASA Space Shuttle requires for liftoff”; on and on. The sheer facticity of this piece is breathtaking!  

Two especially pleasing aspects of “A Star in a Bottle”: (1) the way it includes details of Khatchadourian’s itinerary, making the piece a kind of journey, e.g., he visits the ITER construction site in Aix-en-Provence (“When I arrived, on a late-summer morning, the air was dry and warm – filled with the aroma of pine, lavender, and wild thyme”) and General Atomic’s sixty-thousand-square-foot workspace overlooking Sycamore Canyon (“The floor looked like a shelf of polished glass; as we crossed it, I asked the chief engineer if he was ever tempted to put on skates and race across it”); and (2) its authenticating first-person perspective (“In a bare lobby, I wandered over to a model of the reactor core: a cylinder, dense with mechanical parts, rendered in brightly colored bits of machined plastic”; “I was supposed to meet Chiocchio on the fifth floor of the main building, but when I arrived there was no receptionist, no security to speak of, no one I could find to ask where he was. I heard my footsteps echo down the long, sunlit corridors as I looked for him”; “Before I left France, I joined Janeschitz and Chiocchio, along with several other members of the Praetorian Guard, for a tour of the ITER construction site”). “A Star in a Bottle” is a great piece. I enjoyed it immensely.