Author: BeatrixKiddo

The snow melts in rivulets on the windows, the streets turn to brown mush, undefined precipitation pelts stinging droplets on skin – winter decays. Communication declines down a dimmer, words and phrases repeat, and when someone says it’s just that time of year, the stunted locution cuts straight to some mutually understood, anguished center. In the aerial shot of Lake Michigan on the news, the creep of ice across the water  corresponds to the slow advance of the mid-winter blues.

Carver is working on a bottle of Old Crow and giving us commentary on Raekwon videos while Jonathan diligently mounts pictures on poster board – beside him, Katie fitfully combines pumpkin cookies with milk and pieces of chocolate in a mug. I’m sitting against the refrigerator, looking at an unopened beer and wondering aloud if I really do want to go to this music cooperative performance thing. Nobody answers my non-question. Minutes later, when Carver inexplicably turns the lights off and turns on a Blondie song and the ceiling fan, we continue our crafts and pondering for long minutes before we acknowledge anything has changed. Watching Katie stir her sugary whims, I open my beer. When Veronica comes to get me I tell her I’ve decided not to go, then find myself following her out the door anyways, pockets stuffed with pumpkin cookies.

Huron street has become a whistling thoroughfare for winter wind, and as we made our way to the Yellow Barn, squashing accidental pirouettes in the slush, Ari claps her hands over her exposed ears and retreats from conversation, maybe regretting her half-shaved head, or the careful braid that binds up her remaining hair. I remember the cold hitting my own shaved skull two years ago when I braved the dark January morning walk to Mojo to do battle with the dish room. I remember singing Lana Del Rey softly into the howling dish machine as I burned my hands on the residual hot water left in cereal bowls: Heaven is a place on earth with you/tell me all the things you wanna do.

“What a band of outsiders,” says Veronica as she walks back to our huddle from the ATM on Main street. Un Bande Apart, in dress as in personality: Let’s wear something crazy, Ari had said an hour ago, at dinner. I hadn’t really meant to participate, but a hairy, scabbed knee was now poking out of a large run in my gray tights. I had walked into a sidewalk jaw and knee first last weekend, and my last pair of intact tights had split on contact with the pavement. Over the past month, the icy world has marked me with an accumulation of bruises and scabs on my knees and elbows, visible accompaniments to the deeper bodily pain from the bone-rattling of so many falls.

I don’t mind walking, especially not now, to this show, but I suddenly remember that I do miss driving in cars. I miss the way that sometimes windshield wipers screech to life when you turn the ignition on a clear day, and you remember that it rained last night, or the way that the frozen wiper twitch and groan against its shackles. Most of all I miss the calm role of the backseat rider, who helplessly surrenders to the currents of music and conversation in the front seat and finds herself left alone to touch hot breath, then hot fingers to the cold window, to marvel at the resistance of the frost on the other side to fog-inscribed hearts and initials. In high school, we would fly in rattling hand-me-down cars across the freeway that cut through downtown Grand Rapids from my neighborhood to the west side, passing at the joint of exits (the exits we only took in summer, the exits that heralded that smooth sunny cruise to Lake Michigan, the exits where Julia would say, “Okay, now!” and I would turn on Sufjan Stevens Chicago, or Jimi Hendrix Gypsy Eyes) the place where the crows circled and screamed around the scaffolding of a church steeple. Why are the crows always here? Why only here? I would think to myself. But I was always in the backseat in high school, engaged in my window-activities, and I never said anything about it. Besides, there was something about the sloping elevation of the highway that seemed to compel the presence of the crows. Hadn’t I read a book where the narrator heard laughter from under a bridge? Were the crows maybe the mosquitoes to the still water of some presence that lurked, eternally laughing, beneath the speeding cars?

We pass the YMCA, which feels wrong, and Jay and I start debating whether the Yellow Barn is even on this street. After we try the doors of an abandoned warehouse, I peer around the corner and see the venue, exactly as I remembered it from my melancholy experience at an EQMC show a year ago. The boy who had taken my ticket at that other show had already been a kind of phantom of my past, and we exchanged ghostly smiles when he stamped my hand. I had left that show early, wondering if the time that I knew him had been a kind of painful last adolescence, after which I wouldn’t have such acute feelings about small things. I wondered: were the repeated, numbing fingertip burns of the hot dishwater inevitable? Should I have worn another pair of gloves?

The boy who stamps my hand at this show is a stranger and he processes our transaction in complete silence, using unexpectedly confusing hand gestures.

The crowd is respectful, and family friendly – a baby wearing tiny noise cancelling headphones sleeps soundly through the entire first act. Before intermission, there are several acts: a dancer accompanies a bassist with a scorchingly sweet voice, our friend Isaac plays acoustic guitar to accompany stories about how, by scavenging out of panda express dumpsters, he sometimes tried to bring down the system by eating it (the audience/stage setup placing his conversational insanity within a properly appreciative context), and a man plays keyboard composition with an aching, fluid theme.

After the intermission, a man materializes at the microphone and explains that he is going to tell a story. This particular story is from the Ramayana, and will describe how Hanuman, servant of Lord Rama, demonstrated his love and devotion for Rama by taking a mighty leap of faith across the ocean from Southern India to the Himalayas in order to rescue Rama’s lover, Sita.

Finished with his introduction, man begins to sing – first of Rama’s perfection, of love for Rama, of Rama’s trials, of Rama’s love for Sita. Two drummers follow the narrative with precise, quickly changing rhythms, and voices appear from nowhere, chanting, humming, singing in synchronized harmony with the performer. The lights flash, and a disconcerting fraction of the people sitting on the floor rise and dance wildly between the seated audience and the performer, as though to willfully hide him, allowing us to see only the story and adulation of the story. Where is that voice from nowhere?

The nuances of Hanuman’s feats may have escaped me as the rhythms overpowered me, but I heard that he loosed himself against the empty sky, that as he rose to leap, ‘a thousand trees rose with him. I heard the gasps of the choking animals of the earth when Hanuman’s father the Wind protested his death. I heard the wind cry, “My heart is broken. My cup of rage is full.” Like the most carefully composed piece of musical theater, the temper of the melody corresponded to the narrative; meanwhile, the drumbeats fell like the invisible punctuation of a line break, imbuing the words with poetic syntax. I felt a familiar pain when Hanuman landed on the mountain, and his jaw struck first. Mine too, I thought, rubbing the bruise on my jawbone, and not too long ago.

The performance ended to a standing ovation. Still clapping, exchanging excited comments on the performance, my friends and I drifted unconsciously from our seats to the front of the crowd, trying see what was behind the dancers, to grasp at the last threads of the story – but all that remained were the drum kits, lit by flashing pink and red lights.

By the time we left, the winter night had cast off its decay. The snow was falling crystal-bright, new and hard. The temperature had plunged, and the cold stung my exposed knee as if in mockery –  you thought winter was done? Just because everyone’s got the blues?

I imagine that I am leaping across Lake Michigan to rescue Rama’s lover. I will find her in the backseat of Ravana’s car, tracing her own initials inside of a frosty heart, dreaming of spring.

“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

Earlier this week, I was perusing the National Public Radio website when I saw an interview with author Olivia Laing titled ‘The Mythos of the Boozing Writer.’ Laing talked to an interviewer about her new book, ‘Trip to Echo Spring,’ which explores the alcoholism of a selection of famous, beloved American writers.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the stereotype of the ‘boozing writer’ was surrounded by mythology – in fact, I hadn’t even questioned that it was true. The alcoholism of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to me a characteristic both inextricable from their personas and intertwined with the substance of most of their work.

Although the stereotype of the heavy-drinking writer is based in reality – a huge amount of beloved American writers have been alcoholics, including 4 of the 6 Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature – Laing argues that many famous alcoholic writers, worked so hard to establish a romanticized idea of the boozing writer mostly in order to cover up the darker realities of their own alcoholism. Laing suggests in her interview that Hemingway in particular was responsible glamorizing the idea of the heavy-drinking writer, creating a romanticized account of alcoholism that she says is in some ways ‘addicting in itself.’

In her book, Laing focuses specifically on Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, Scott F. Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever – all writers who have produced some of the most beautiful and beloved literature of all time, and all virulent alcoholics. Although these famous writers rarely actually wrote drunk, they certainly thought of alcohol as an intrinsic part of the creative process, and often wrote about alcoholism. Here, the difference between these writers’ accounts of their alcohol consumption and the realities of their alcohol abuse becomes a kind of sore spot for many who love their work – if we often engage with the works of these greats with the assumption that their descriptive genius can provide us with penetrating truths, unfogged by pettiness or subterfuge, are we being cheated by the accidental artifice of an active alcoholic’s take on alcoholism?

Lewis Hyde’s essay ‘Alcohol and Poetry,’ which specifically investigates the effects of alcoholism on the works of John Berryman, was one of the first explorations of the myth of the creative alcoholic. In response to critics who fear that a prejudice against alcoholic authors could in some way deprive us of a beloved literary canon, Hyde has declared that he “would shudder to think of a culture that would canonize these voices without marking where they fail us.”

In Hyde’s opinion, the active alcoholic cannot write with veracity about alcoholism. These writer’s twisted takes on alcoholism stand as accidents, artistic failures in their legacy. But many alcoholic writers have also given us tragically discerning accounts of alcohol abuse. Laing argues that the writers she researches often leave out the darker side of alcoholism, quantified in lost jobs, destroyed relationships and damaged families. But not all of these writers shy away from this side of alcoholism – in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night,’ we watch Dick Diver deteriorate as his drinking problem becomes increasingly destructive; John Cheever’s famous short story ‘The Swimmer’ describes the tragedy of a declining alcoholic over the course of an increasingly surreal afternoon.

With the emergence of new scientific research, Alcoholics Anonymous, and 12 step programs, writers no longer control the broader cultural narrative on alcoholism. However, the mythology they have created still seems to control the narrative on alcoholism in creative communities. How significant is it that the ‘great writer’ is still usually pictured with a drink in hand? Of all of the points that Laing made in her interview, this one stuck with me: the alcoholism of great writers was less an effect of a riotous, inspired existence and more a symptom of deep, untreated depression. This may be the true failure of the intellectual community’s embrace of the ‘mythos of the boozing writer’ – it glamorizes, and in doing so dismisses, human suffering.

On Tuesday, the Center for Education of Women marked its 50^th anniversary with a celebration of women in film at the Michigan Theater, an event that included screenings of six short films as well as a question and answer session with director Cynthia Wade. The exhibited short films addressed a variety of complex, intersectional issues -  ‘Stairs To No End (http://www.oanim.com/5384)’ explored freedom of thought, ‘You Can Touch My Hair (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpak8kkVT4U) ’ followed a provocative interactive art exhibit and probed the racial, social and gender dynamics surrounding black women’s hair, and ‘Undressing My Mother (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x65waoOY6B0)’ painted a loving portrait of age and beauty.

With a run time of 48 minutes, Cynthia Wade’s documentary ‘Mondays at Racine’ was both the longest featured film and the most emotionally exhausting. The film follows a salon on Long Island that offers monthly free services to female cancer patients, exploring the convergence between illness, appearance and marriage in the stories of women who frequent the salon. Salon owners Rachel Delmolfetto and Cynthia Sansone also provide pedicures, makeovers, and emotional support in addition to head-shavings for clients who are losing their hair from chemotherapy treatments. For the women featured, the head-shaving represents a reluctant embrace of the inevitable physical changes caused by chemo – they describe the change in appearance as a kind of forced confrontation with the ways that illness changes their self-identity, repeatedly articulating the fear of looking in the mirror and only seeing a cancer patient. The film uses the salon’s services as a jumping off point for profiles of two different salon customers, 36 year old Cambria and 58 year old Linda.

Wade explores Cambria’s struggle to combat her diagnosis of Stage 3 breast cancer while parenting her young son and continuing with her husband in the adoption process of a foster child. As her husband provides firm support and partnership, Cambria voices her personal doubts and fears about her future to the camera. Her desire to live manifests itself in her expressions of love for her children, her fears that they won’t remember her, and her longing to see them grow up.

When Wade focuses on Linda, who has combatted her breast cancer for 17 years, we see the latent stages of the isolation caused by her years of illness and treatment. Linda and her husband Warren fail to communicate with each other, explaining separately and sorrowfully how the suffering caused by Linda’s illness has slowly eroded their relationship. As Warren acknowledges his burgeoning alcoholism, he expresses his feelings of helplessness in gendered terms – he feels that he has failed Linda because he hasn’t been ‘enough of a man.’ Towards the end of the movie, the couple separates and Warren moves out of the house – however, in Wade’s question and answer session directly after the movie she explained that Linda and Warren reconciled after viewing the movie together and hearing each other’s separate interviews. Wade described how the couple enjoyed attending festivals to promote the film together, often sharing their perspective on illness and marriage in question and answer sessions. The film ended with Linda’s decision to discontinue treatment, and Wade responded to questions about Linda’s well being by gently informing the emotional crowd that Linda had passed away peacefully last summer.

As Wade explained in her introduction, the stories of chemotherapy and suffering were heavily intertwined with themes of endurance, marriage, partnership and love. At the end of the film, a woman with long auburn locks enters the salon cheerfully, calmly explaining that she is undergoing chemo and ready to shave her head. Before her head is half shorn, she is trembling and weeping. “I hate it,” she says weakly, as Cambria and Linda offer support. Her boyfriend meets her at the salon and cradles her shorn head as she cries – he holds her, quietly reassuring her of his love, telling her that she is still beautiful.

 

At the beginning of this semester, as I worried about distribution requirements in my political science advisor’s office, I assured her that the Beginning Drawing class I had in my registration backpack had been put there on a whim. To my surprise, the advisor was delighted by my whim and urged me to keep the class on my schedule, eventually mysteriously manipulating something on her computer to help me fill a requirement. I was reminded of the nonchalance of my nuclear family’s emphasis on art – an art class, she felt, would obviously do me good.

She was right. Drawing is a constant tic for me, an activity that I can engage in almost unconsciously – so being forced to devote three hours, twice a week, to developing my skills and ideas has felt enormously cathartic. Although I wasn’t a ‘true’ beginner in that I could already draw fairly accurately, I hadn’t tried to really make progress in developing my abilities in a long time.

My favorite part of the class was the month long segment on figure drawing.

I love figure drawing for so many reasons, but mostly because it forces you let go of so many anxieties about the human form. In order to draw the hand, face or torso in front of you, you have to get rid of previous conceptions about what how those pieces of the body look, or ‘should’ look. Each individual’s body is an accumulation of their history that exhibits itself most obviously in scars and tattoos, but also in certain postures, masses of muscle, accumulations of fat, and tones of skin. This is why books that teach figure drawing tend to only impart generalizations – abstract instructions can only guide you to draw a perfect hand, an ideal profile, a measured bicep, pieces that sum up to a perfectly proportionate but fictional body. But when you draw from life, these rules (i.e., figures should be nine ‘heads’ tall, with shoulders three ‘heads’ across) are often confounded by perspective, space and the oddity of physical variation.

My favorite model was large, with rounded belly and breasts that the class delighted in suggesting with a few animated strokes of the pencil. Her mass filled up our papers (or dwelt a little off to the side, depending on whether I remembered the lessons on composition), and the smooth round shapes of her body lent themselves to broad gesture. The woman’s poses were the product of heavy, stolid efforts, accompanied by coughs, but her weight was consistently grandiose and powerful on our newsprint pages. As she doggedly raised her hands in the air for a five-minute pose, our drawings reflected how gravity appeared to be pulling her body downwards; as she sat or lay down we scribbled to describe the bows and bends of her protruding curves.

As the class progressed, our teacher suggested that we use our non-dominant hand to suggest the pose, or that we use multiple utensils bunched together in our fists. To my surprise, I loved my left-handed drawing, finding that my crudest attempts sometimes expressed the figure the most accurately. The gestural exercises that looked more like lines and less like humans captured something important about impermanence in their very lack of development: the human figure can’t be divorced from its vast potential for action and movement, not even if it holds very very still. The dead flowers that we contoured, the paper bags, the bottles and boxes and chairs – they had the potential to move but we were too unskilled to see or incorporate it. You can draw an acceptably ‘accurate’ still life without thinking about the potential motion of your fruit basket, but figure drawing somehow necessitates deeper perceptions of motion and mass.

And it’s much harder to form a smooth, developed drawing without losing some of the immediacy that comes in identification between the quick mark on the page and the impermanence of human motion or stillness. Some of my longer figure drawings turned out labored and disjointed because I felt like I had the time to slowly develop pieces of the body separately instead of making quick marks that suggested the figure – but without those initial, abstract descriptions, the pieces of the body failed to unite. When I consequently built my developed drawings on a foundation of gesture drawings, the unmeasured, instinctive marks gave my figures presence.

Within (or maybe above) these struggles, there’s something so amazing, so fascinating about drawing a human body – as my teacher commented, “it’s so hard to draw them, because they’re us.”

It’s hard, but it’s also incredibly fulfilling. Embracing the human form’s oddities is strangely soothing to me, as I am no stranger to physical asymmetry. I was born with a cleft lip (I had my final repair four years ago), and I also have a permanently torn tendon in my right knee that has changed my posture and given me a much stronger, bigger left leg. Physically, these events have left only faded scars, a slight difference in the length of my legs, a minor irregularity in the shape of my nostrils. But to me, a lifetime of understanding self-worth as independent of beauty is intertwined with the scar tissue above my lip; my first encounter with age and permanence bound up in my uneven gait.

I used to consider it a kind of failure that I only wanted to draw people, that bodies engaged my artistic attention while I could only be bored by trees and buildings and tables and apples. But drawing people is essentially different. In class, our poorly drawn figures were sad little beings, slanted and un-souled and hilarious in their misery, but successful figures felt important beyond reason.

For our last self-portrait of the semester, we were only allowed to use our feet. Some people taped pencils to their socks or shoes, others held the pencil between their toes, some looked in the mirror, some didn’t bother. I held the pencil in my toes, and as my leg began to quiver from exhaustion I found that the shaking produced gentle, smooth shading. Slowly, I developed an oval. The drawing was meant to be a funny, loose exercise, and we spent most of the time laughing. But when a human face appeared, beneath my very foot – I can’t explain it, but I could have wept.

Last night, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit brought more than 90 artists to the exhibitions space to make art in a ‘part performance, part laboratory, part art bazaar’ called the Monster Drawing Rally. The live event and fundraiser started at 8pm and was divided into three hour-long shifts, each featuring 30 artists drawing simultaneously. As the drawings were completed, staff and volunteers picked them up, packaged them at a drying station, and hung them on the wall for exhibition and purchase at a uniform price of $40 each.

While the audience talked, mingled, and drank, the artists sat together at long tables set up in the open exhibitions room, practically bumping elbows as they developed their pieces. The sizes of paper provided by MOCAD were standardized, but the materials the artists brought varied widely– I noticed artists using pastels, charcoal, sharpie, micron pens, markers, stamps, collage materials, rubber cement, and the occasional ipod or laptop for reference. It felt oddly intimate to see the artists’ materials set out on their tables – the weathered pencil case, the folder of cut outs, the personal tub of rubber cement, so well known to the artists’ hands, minds and frustrations. Over the hour-long shifts, the audience watched the development of particular pieces. One artist used grids of tape to paint a perfectly geometric toilet plunger, another blew on globules of ink to create organic patterns, and another studiously sketched while glued to the eyepiece of his own personal microscope, which he was using to examine pieces of tape imprinted with what looked like tiny blue fingerprints.

The crowd favorite during the first shift was a blind contour artist named Hamilton, who was making sketches of people in the crowd. Blind contour is a method usually used to practice coordination between the eyes and the hands, so it requires the artist to keep his eyes off of the paper, forcing trust in the translation of visual perception to development on the page. Hamilton kept his subjects engaged, talking and laughing with them as his marker moved on the paper. The results were distorted, deliberately grotesque, but seeing the method added to my understanding – the lines were accurate, the placement deliberately wrong. During the second shift, the crowds gathered around Jonathan, who was making a piece out of chewed gum. “This is the clean bag,” he said, gesturing towards a plastic bag full of gumballs and chiclets. Audience members were encouraged to take a couple pieces, chew, and then spit into Jonathan’s gloved hands. A couple of children were at the front of the crowd, chewing athletically and looking a little bewildered. Jonathan held out his hand to receive a glob of chewed gum from a small girl, who looked slightly mistrustful of this manipulation of material, and he reassured her, “This is good. Look, it’s almost white. We need that color.” The air smelled sickly sweet in Jonathan’s vicinity; Ty, the pen and ink artist sitting next to him, looked less than thrilled.

Although a few artists engaged actively with their audience, most kept their eyes on the paper. One woman’s pen moved wildly as she glanced up and down from the faces of her audience to her paper, but she appeared to be drawing a minute, angled system of scaffolding.

Pieces changed quickly, and sometimes drastically, before our eyes. The black and white sketch of a man’s face – slightly mournful, classically handsome– was suddenly subtitled, in all capitals, ‘SAUSAGE FACTORY;’ a black and white sketch of an aggressively monstrous-looking bird was transformed as it was colored in with pastel markers, and titled in sloppy pen, ‘Compassion + Love are the seeds of hope!’ Many artist seemed to have a calculated plan for their hour – Tavi Veraldi, an artist and friend of my sister’s, confided in me that she was planning to draw an old man. “I’m super good at drawing old men,” she said, adding that she was hoping to dupe the crowd into thinking she was that good at drawing everything. It was a self-deprecating joke – Tavi is that good at drawing everything – but most artists did seem to be using the techniques or concepts that they were most comfortable with to create something coherent within the time constraint.

Even so, I enjoyed watching them at work. Observing a man labor on his sharpie drawing of an owl, I appreciated how his bold lines began as tentative marks – permanent and dark, but easily erased by incorporation. The bold line is presumptive, scary, and enduring, much like the piece of artwork declared, after an hour, ‘finished.’

By the time I arrived at the Michigan Theater for my 6pm shift, someone had already complained. The nice old lady who generally spent her free time before movies talking my ear off about the theater’s selection of caffeinated vs. decaffeinated teas had stormed out of an NC-17 rated French movie, and complained to a manager about her problems with watching, I quote, “lesbians sucking on each other.” If you’ve heard of the movie ‘Blue is the Warmest Color,’ you’ve probably heard of it in certain, defined capacities: it’s french, it’s about lesbians, and it has explicit sex scenes, one of them 7 minutes long. But the film is also much more than the sum of its controversy – director Abdellatif Kerchiche and his two lead actresses have created a masterful, exhausting onscreen love affair, a passionate depiction of an young woman’s awakening consciousness.

The three hour long film follows its young lead, Adéle (Adéle Exarchopolous), in tightly centered close-up, first as she lives her life as a normal French teenager, and then as she experiences the awakening of her desires through her passionate affair with a blue-haired, older woman (Lea Seydoux). Adéle functions as the physical center of the film, and Kerchiche’s camera never strays far from her body – she adjusts her uncombed hair, falls asleep with her mouth open, eats with abandon and cries messily.

The night before I went to see the movie, I spent a slow shift assigned to guard the screening room doors from unwary or curious children. After fifteen minutes of staring at an empty hallway, I took it upon myself to protect the innocents from inside the theater while I watched some of the film. I expected to be lost, at the two hour mark, for lack of context  – but I was immediately transfixed. I walked in on a scene that takes place well into the affair, wherein Emma and Adéle throw a backyard dinner party to showcase Emma’s paintings. Adéle cooks and serves food to the artistic elite as Emma showcases enormous canvases, her paintings of Adéle’s nude, posed body. Any conversation is focused around art analysis, incomplete and interspersed between food, drink and dance, so I was amazed both at how quickly the acting and direction conveyed the intricacies of the women’s relationship. Adéle is down to earth and practical, serving food, drink, and single-sentence descriptions of her career aspirations – ‘I teach.’ She emits an embarrassed glow when Emma recognizes her with a toast, but then sinks into disappointment and anxiety as Emma spends her night talking to another woman. Adéle listens to the PhD students and artists converse over her head as she nods along, the domestic partner; Emma debates with her highly educated friends about different artists (mostly visual artists famous for depicting the female figure) while they devour Adéle’s spaghetti and admire paintings of Adéle’s nude body. Later, in bed, Emma urges Adéle to develop her writing skills, wanting her to want something less simple, but Adéle resists – she is fulfilled just by being with Emma.

Although it’s easy to get a headache over tea lady’s insistence on being shocked by screentime devoted to lesbian sex, criticism of Kerchiche’s sex scenes has come from a variety of more credible sources, including Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel that ‘Blue’ was based on (who called the sex scenes “pornographic” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/movies/julie-maroh-author-of-blue-novel-criticizes-film.html). The sex scenes are uncomfortable, but not necessarily because of length. After all, Kerchiche lingers on Adéle’s walk to the bus, her tearful consumption of a snickers bar, the leaf in her hair – so why would he introduce brevity in sex, the realization of the affair’s intimacy? No, the problem is the change in tone. None of the messiness of sex is admitted – the female bodies are staged, posed, and pondered by the camera, but we see no glimpse of Adéle’s previous physicality, none of the character established by her unabashed eating habits and her moist, crying face. Kerchiche’s camera also breaks its tight focus on Adéle, continuity with which would mandate intimate sequences cut up by movement, and moves back to encompass both women. This abandonment of Adéle’s perspective has a weird effect; it seems that there is a third party is sitting in the room watching, and we become conscious of the camera and of ourselves as viewers. Ironically –  but maybe understandably –  the sex scenes interrupt the intimacy of the relationship.

Yet walking away from the film, I realized that I haven’t seen so much screen time devoted to women in the recent past, maybe ever (The Bechdel test exists for a reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s), and I’d never seen a filmed love story that didn’t struggle with, or fail to struggle with, a gendered power dynamic. The female form is an overarching theme – artistic depictions of the female, physical needs of the female, emotional awakenings of the female – and the movie is almost exclusively about the nuances of a love between two women. However, Kerchiche’s camera, script and direction do occasionally interject a male presence. At one point, a dinner guest and art gallery owner named Joachim speaks about male portrayals of female sexuality, arguing that throughout time male artists have been ‘transfixed’ by the perceived transcendence of the female orgasm, and that male artists have historically struggled to depict the mystery of female sexuality. Here, Kerchiche appears to be speaking through Joachim to preemptively admit his failures in understanding. It’s a little heavy handed, but it kind of works in that I do find myself giving giving the movie a break when it comes to the sex scenes, the anxieties about children and families, and that problematic mention of female sexuality as mystical – not because these aren’t real gaps in understanding, but because the rest of the movie is so overwhelmingly good that it transcends them.

As the love story develops with painful, feverish beauty, it’s hard not to be consumed by Adéle’s experience. The story of Emma and Adéle has universal, epic proportions: They live, they awaken, they make art, they suffer, they love. Yet at the same time, their relationship seems so close to us, so lifelike, so real. And although Kerchiche may filming with a ‘male gaze,’ the actresses are so talented and expressive that they practically gaze back – Kerchiche may have been behind the camera, but Seydoux and Exarchopolous undoubtedly played a part in creating their own characters. ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ is beautiful, painful, compelling. Together, Kerchiche, Seydoux and Exarchopolous have created a masterpiece.