Maybe it's the hype. Hype always builds up your expectations. And the more you allow your expectations to build up, they're likely to be disappointed. But in the case of 'La vie d'Adèle', I'm pretty sure that this is not all to it, since I watched it with a Lesbian friend. And while it left me - a gay man in his 40s - totally indifferent, she hated it. This was supposed to be my 'save-the-best-for-last' movie of the year. Now it's pretty much my stinker of the year. Sure, I've watched far worse movies in 2013. I just haven't watched anything which disappointed me to such an extent.
We spent a couple of hours after the film discussing just what we didn't like about it. For her, the answer was easy because she owns the graphic novel by Julie Maroh on which it's based. I've read it meanwhile and understand her reservations. The book follows Adèle's diary and is therefore more introspective and emotional than the film. The reader gets a better idea how much time passes. The characters are drawn as normal women, decidedly less pretty than the actresses. The ending is completely different, much more tragical and hard-hitting - it's a mystery to me why Kechiche decided to change the story to such an extent.
And the sex in the book is - lyrical, that being what infuriated my friend most about the film. According to her, all that humping and moaning is just what she expected a straight male director to come up with - a fantasy of what Lesbian sex is like. Only women would get it right, like Donna Deitch in the classic 'Desert Hearts', or Lisa Cholodenko in 'High Art', or Kimberly Peirce in 'Boys don't cry'. The author Julie Maroh expressed a similar criticism, describing the sex scene as ridiculous.
I understand these frustrations since what I halfway expected to be a Lesbian 'Weekend', i.e. a film that takes the sensationalism out of gay sex and focuses on love, highlights the sex to push for controversy / interest with straight audiences. That's the only explanation I find for giving both female leads the best actress award at Cannes, even though Adèle Exarchopoulos has about three times as much screen time. People think it's courageous to show gay sex, so nobody cares if that depiction is actually accurate. Saying that the film expresses how natural gay sex is doesn't really help when you're gay - since we know that already, thank you very much.
Then again, the film won the Palme d'Or clearly for political reasons, since at the time there was a highly embarrassing campaign against gay marriage in France. So maybe homosexuals still have to welcome the lesser of two evils, condescending sympathy over pseudo-religious ignorance or downright hatred - but oh what a depressing thought that is. When such a thing happens to me - hearing 'watching that and that film made me totally understand that being gay is normal' - I'd like to respond 'that's like telling a black person you've seen '12 Years a Slave' and now understand what it means to be black'. But I don't because people who get this wouldn't make such remarks in the first place. They'd already understand that film is always an interpretation of reality, never reality itself.
However, my indifference to the film is more based on liking Kechiche's previous film 'Black Venus' a whole lot more. It showed all the ugliness of typical European racism (the 'scientific' kind), being about a Herero woman in the 19th century who is at first turned into a circus attraction, then an object of study, and finally - inevitably - a prostitute. What made this film so great was that it wasn't as much about a black woman stoically suffering her fate, but us Europeans with our ongoing tendency to categorize and thereby control all things foreign - the exact opposite of this film, where the spectator sees everything through Adèle's eyes, so if you don't buy into her views, you lose the movie (or the movie loses you).
All of this doesn't make 'La vie d'Adèle' a bad film, it's still a strong love story owing to the source material, but I can't help but wonder what so many people see in it. The performances may be intense, but they're not convincing if you've been in its character's shoes - and according to the actresses' statements it would seem that their intensity owes a lot to the director's erratic on-set behavior. Maybe if you don't watch many European films, or have never seen a Lesbian-themed film before, you can end up being taken so aback by the sex scenes - which, credit where credit is due, are carefully embedded in the story - that you'll go 'wow'. But if you're a cineast, if you know French film, if you know the LGBT film canon, or if you're just plain gay, then you can't help but wonder what all the fuss is about - and if the wonderful graphic novel wouldn't have turned out far more impressive, had it been adapted by a woman instead.
We spent a couple of hours after the film discussing just what we didn't like about it. For her, the answer was easy because she owns the graphic novel by Julie Maroh on which it's based. I've read it meanwhile and understand her reservations. The book follows Adèle's diary and is therefore more introspective and emotional than the film. The reader gets a better idea how much time passes. The characters are drawn as normal women, decidedly less pretty than the actresses. The ending is completely different, much more tragical and hard-hitting - it's a mystery to me why Kechiche decided to change the story to such an extent.
And the sex in the book is - lyrical, that being what infuriated my friend most about the film. According to her, all that humping and moaning is just what she expected a straight male director to come up with - a fantasy of what Lesbian sex is like. Only women would get it right, like Donna Deitch in the classic 'Desert Hearts', or Lisa Cholodenko in 'High Art', or Kimberly Peirce in 'Boys don't cry'. The author Julie Maroh expressed a similar criticism, describing the sex scene as ridiculous.
I understand these frustrations since what I halfway expected to be a Lesbian 'Weekend', i.e. a film that takes the sensationalism out of gay sex and focuses on love, highlights the sex to push for controversy / interest with straight audiences. That's the only explanation I find for giving both female leads the best actress award at Cannes, even though Adèle Exarchopoulos has about three times as much screen time. People think it's courageous to show gay sex, so nobody cares if that depiction is actually accurate. Saying that the film expresses how natural gay sex is doesn't really help when you're gay - since we know that already, thank you very much.
Then again, the film won the Palme d'Or clearly for political reasons, since at the time there was a highly embarrassing campaign against gay marriage in France. So maybe homosexuals still have to welcome the lesser of two evils, condescending sympathy over pseudo-religious ignorance or downright hatred - but oh what a depressing thought that is. When such a thing happens to me - hearing 'watching that and that film made me totally understand that being gay is normal' - I'd like to respond 'that's like telling a black person you've seen '12 Years a Slave' and now understand what it means to be black'. But I don't because people who get this wouldn't make such remarks in the first place. They'd already understand that film is always an interpretation of reality, never reality itself.
However, my indifference to the film is more based on liking Kechiche's previous film 'Black Venus' a whole lot more. It showed all the ugliness of typical European racism (the 'scientific' kind), being about a Herero woman in the 19th century who is at first turned into a circus attraction, then an object of study, and finally - inevitably - a prostitute. What made this film so great was that it wasn't as much about a black woman stoically suffering her fate, but us Europeans with our ongoing tendency to categorize and thereby control all things foreign - the exact opposite of this film, where the spectator sees everything through Adèle's eyes, so if you don't buy into her views, you lose the movie (or the movie loses you).
All of this doesn't make 'La vie d'Adèle' a bad film, it's still a strong love story owing to the source material, but I can't help but wonder what so many people see in it. The performances may be intense, but they're not convincing if you've been in its character's shoes - and according to the actresses' statements it would seem that their intensity owes a lot to the director's erratic on-set behavior. Maybe if you don't watch many European films, or have never seen a Lesbian-themed film before, you can end up being taken so aback by the sex scenes - which, credit where credit is due, are carefully embedded in the story - that you'll go 'wow'. But if you're a cineast, if you know French film, if you know the LGBT film canon, or if you're just plain gay, then you can't help but wonder what all the fuss is about - and if the wonderful graphic novel wouldn't have turned out far more impressive, had it been adapted by a woman instead.