There’s no place like New York for a good old-fashioned cry. But sometimes, it makes you work for it. Recently, a chance radio broadcast took me three trains cross-borough to meet my hero, into a night that left me sobbing in my best shoes at the center of Manhattan’s cultural mecca.
Earlier that afternoon, an interview on Leonard Lopate brought my attention to Jane Campion’s upcoming career retrospective at Lincoln Center. I emailed my editor for a ticket immediately. If you’re not familiar with Campion, she’s essentially a filmmaking rock star. More notable than her glass ceiling-shattering awards record, is Campion’s lifetime of proudly wearing the scarlet letter W, for Woman. She has lifted up other women and loved them, examined them, and told their stories — not sexy, abridged, male-appeasing facsimiles — but true, fiercely honest stories. It’s understandable, though frustrating, that many other female directors have not done the same; and rather felt forced to abandon femininity in the pursuit of assimilating to a male-dominated industry. To an aspiring “female filmmaker” like myself (because the term filmmaker alone still denotes masculinity), she is a lighthouse in a very bleak ocean... [click to read more]
In an attempt to consolidate my growing body of work, I’ve re-focused this space to be solely for writing. For exploring thoughts and ranting. For talking about things I really like. I’ve moved all the showing off to a new place called sophiaharveyfilms.com. Take a look if you’re interested in bright colors, fun, movies, art, really big pictures, and an attempt at medium sized and maybe some day really big ideas.
It’s one of the first truly miserable nights of fall. Rain washes the streets with the swamp-like odor of Manhattan’s Chinatown, pedestrians assert their umbrellas and tighten their peacoats, and the only happy people in sight are those in line for The Slipper Room. Eager CMJ concertgoers pour, wet and shivering, into the modest venue entrance on Orchard Street. Upstairs awaits a lush burlesque hall with floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtains and gold-painted mahogany woodwork. We huddle together and clutch our drinks as the lights go down. A drum-beat kicks, a synthesizer swells, and a woman stands center stage wearing an animal-print muumuu of pink silk and a necklace made of bones; into the microphone she shouts, “We’re Emily Danger and it’s my goddamn birthday!”
The band dives into a raucous performance of “Going Down,” a defiant song off of their latest album, Peace Arch, that bemoans the idiocy of homophobia in the South. Front-woman Emily Nicholas’ powerful vocals roar while Cameron Orr shreds on the violin and brand-new drummer Ricky Watts beats time in a goosebump-inspiring, country-infused political rock anthem. They’ve gripped the room with energy and they won’t let go until the very end of their set. Their sound is singular and rebellious, complex and haunting. Emily Danger’s self-proclaimed “dark cabaret rock” is like nothing I’ve heard before, incorporating hints of Radiohead and Björk, to name some of many influences. As they gear up for one of their slower songs, “Easy (Remix),” Nicholas asks the audience if we’re ready “to go to sexytown.” We are. Orr raises his bow but suddenly the violin cuts out. While technical difficulties are common, they are nonetheless nerve-racking for any performer. But a word from longtime producer and bassist, Devon C. Johnson, and something magical happens. Nicholas abandons the microphone and stands alone in the spotlight. The words come from somewhere deep within her and the room shrinks to her a cappella. She lingers on each word of the wrenching opening. “I fell before I think you did, and now disaster has taken place.” An already emotional song comes into stark relief, given depth by this raw voice that can fill an entire venue on its own.
A few days later, I sit in Nicholas’ living room in South Slope, Brooklyn. Light streams in from the window and the room is small and filled with vibrance. The space we are in doubles as a studio and paintings compete for room with books and records (Pavoratti to Portishead) and all the other materials of her constantly churning life. I can’t help but notice that Nicholas’ eyes are always huge. She habitually sweeps bangs aside and looks at you expectantly, optimistically.
We are discussing the a cappella moment from earlier in the week. It’s fun, she says, to remember that she can do that. She explains the feeling as something more personal, vulnerable, and freeing. “It comes from the place where you would hold a child, so it feels very womanly.” Of course, what she’s talking about is singing from the diaphragm, something Nicholas was trained for at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, where she acquired her master’s degree in opera. But she describes this schooling as more of an obligation than a passion. In fact, she hated opera. (She looks at me intensely and enunciates “hat-ed”). And no sooner did she finish her degree, did she leave it behind forever.
Nicholas describes a night in school, waiting backstage, where she was paralyzed with stage fright. “People were like, ‘it’s your time now, you have to go on. Other people are waiting for you to sing your line.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t think today I’m gonna do it.’” She laughs so easily at the story that it’s hard to imagine this woman ever being afraid of anything. Soon after that night came her graduation recital where, after a full lineup of classical pieces, Nicholas closed the performance with James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World.”
“Everybody was on their feet and afterwards they said it was the best part…and even though it was still somebody else’s song, I had more fun doing it and I feel like I revealed more artistry because it’s the style of music that I love. So to hear that [support] from my peers, and people I respect, and then to feel so emotionally attached, that’s when I was like, enough’s enough. So I just stopped.” Stopped opera, that is. That was three years ago and Nicholas has been writing and performing her own rock music ever since. And it’s moments like those, when the violin cuts out, that make room for the artistic spontaneity that Nicholas loves. There is no perfection in rock and roll, she reflects to me, you are allowed to mess up. It seems as if that realization, that diffusion of pressure, is what started Nicholas down the path to her present, arm-waving, muumuu-wearing self.
She is instantly warm. As soon as I walked in the door to her apartment, Nicholas met me with a large hug and a cup of coffee, wearing yet another memorable get-up; this time a hand-painted, neon yellow and white XXXXL t-shirt with black and white striped leggings. She introduced me to her husband and collaborator, John Patrick Wells, and joked about how she has to write herself reminders to Instagram and finish her coffee.
And there are indeed notes everywhere. Wells sits by their shared desk; it is littered with paints and notebooks and half-finished mugs of coffee. Above the desk is a bookcase with more notes tacked on. (Nicholas’ to-do list has no coffee reminder, but it is indeed extremely detailed.)
It’s difficult to reconcile these stories of the stage-frightened opera student with the larger-than-life, wild rocker on stage or the easy-going person in front of me. But it’s exactly that discrepancy that’s so interesting. Emily Nicholas the singer/songwriter and Emily Danger the band (formally together for less than two years), have matured at a rapid pace, as if Nicholas had spent her whole life preparing for the moment that she would excite an audience of stiff-collared professors with a little soul.
The show at The Slipper Room marked Nicholas’ 30th birthday and she brought down the house in just the same way. They closed the show with two songs: their new single, “War Torn,” and a blood-pumping cover of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” that ended with Nicholas giving a riled-up audience the finger while belting, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” into the microphone. No stage-fright remained.
“Is this you?” I ask. “Absolutely,” she nods vigorously, setting her coffee down on a Ziggy Stardust coaster. “It used to feel like a persona because of the fear I had when I first started out.” She speaks freely of the pressures of living up to the likes of classical singers, and the expectations of professors and peers, and the immense anxiety that that can bring to a performance. “This new album has grown me up, and working with a band and collaborating and feeling like my voice is heard in the room– that show in particular, being on my birthday, was just like a big ol’ “F— it,” let’s go. It’s me, it’s totally me. I can’t really be as large in my daily life but that’s how I feel inside.”
Nicholas grew up in Bakersfield, California, a town to which she attributes the band’s occasional honky-tonk twang. She and her parents differ on religion and politics, she explains; “My mom directs the church choir, that kind of thing.” But contrary to what one might imagine, Nicholas was always encouraged to continue banging on pots and pans. And that encouragement carried through to grad school. Nicholas is mid-sip when I open my line of familial questioning with, “Are they mad—” she nearly spits her coffee all over the couch and Wells laughs from across the room. “Don’t continue, stop there, that’s perfect,” he says.
“I think they saw it coming when I started picking up instruments…and staying out late…” she answers, gathering herself after the near-Marx Brothers incident. Nicholas paints an amusing picture of the time her father came to a show at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, which she describes as “not really a dad-in-his-sixties type of venue.”
“There was stuff hanging from the ceilings, there were people smoking outside, there was a guy doing coke outside.” Nicholas has a well of pride in her eyes when she tells me that he loved it. “All he said to me about it was, ‘this is what you should be doing.’”
It’s a rare experience talking to someone who has, essentially, stumbled upon her bliss—especially in New York City, a place where dreams often come to work tirelessly and shape shift or disintegrate. Nicholas describes the progression from the band’s first EP, Paintings, to Peace Arch, to the currently in-production War Torn, as all uphill, particularly given how how quickly it happened.
In between the two published albums, Emily Danger introduced synthesizers, much more drum, and many other sometimes-instruments, which allowed them to explore a soundscape that is as far-reaching as Nicholas’ four-octave vocal range and Orr’s violin virtuosity. In current shows they load as many instruments, keyboards and pedals on the stage as possible. And just as Nicholas always wears JoJo Americo clothing, Orr never wears shoes. “He adjusts knobs with his toes,” Emily whispers like he’s in the room.
Lyrics-wise, the band has grown up as well. As is the case with most new writers, Nicholas’ words on Paintings come mostly from a personal place. And although that still exists in the band’s current work, she describes Peace Arch as more progressive. It wrestles with personal issues, this time, through an esoteric, world-conscious lens, oftentimes tackling the political as well.
But as Emily Danger has come into focus, the band has triggered some upset, something Emily considers to be, in part, a result of her sex. “I’m going to be pretty frank,” she leans in, as if to tell me a dirty secret, “I think it pisses people off that a woman is saying these things. A lot.” I think back to her on stage at The Slipper Room, channeling all the strong, angry women who came before her as she stood, holding up the middle finger in firm alliance with her politics. Nicholas has a history of choosing unexpected covers. In fact, that’s how she got the nickname “Danger” in grad school. But apparently, “Killing in the Name” is not a hit with everyone. She says that when they unveiled their version of the song earlier this year, even her closest friends questioned it. “I think specifically because I’m a female, saying those words, being that pissed on stage, making such an obvious political solidarity statement—that scares people and when people are scared their initial reaction is ‘no.’ They just shut it off.”
It’s astonishing that in this day and age, with a history of performers including Patti Smith, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday before them, that this should still be an issue. How many angry women will have to flip the bird, literally or metaphorically, on stage before people start listening? Emily Danger uses their collective experience, and sometimes their collective anger, to add another voice to the protest. In some ways, however, the shock value attached to a woman donning some stereotypically masculine protest-pants may work in the band’s favor. They’re definitely booking gigs. And maybe that’s all that matters, as long as people keep hearing what they have to say.
And Nicholas has a lot to say, none of which she’s going to change to please an audience. “I would rather not cater to everybody than be fluffy, cotton-candy-likable. I would rather be a little aloof, a little left of center. And there’s a lot of sacrifice in that. I’m never going to be rich, I’m never gonna have my own plane, I’m never gonna be Beyoncé (and I love Beyoncé). But that’s just not who I am, I don’t think I could put on that kind of show anymore. I spent the majority of my life stifling who I am and I had a birthday last week and I’m ready to not do that anymore.”
Peace Arch is definitely far from cotton candy. It is raw in its approach to topics personal as well as political. Nicholas’ husband has been sitting with us while we talk, and at some point we get to the topic of their relationship. She admits, “we fight all the time, and I write about it.” Wells nods from his desk. “I have a no-holds-barred thing with my lyrics. If it’s obviously about him it’s going on record, sorry, that’s just what it’s gonna be. And the same thing with his visual art, he can use me and has used me.” She gestures to several large paintings that adorn the apartment walls, one of which is a canvas dripping with the same pink wax used in Emily Danger’s “Shed My Skin” music video. She sees their interactions, positive or difficult, as “fuel for our artistic fire.”
They are each other’s muses and collaborators and, like most artists in New York City, they live and work together in tight quarters, all the time. Fighting is inevitable. But it is clear that Wells is a constant support to Nicholas and her work (he has also directed all of the band’s excellent music videos). Next to her to-do list on their bookshelf is his list, which is made up of penciled-in social media figures: “Shed” 1204 1132 1507, “Peace” 1567 1344, and so on. These are daily hits for the band’s music videos. He explains to me how important it is to have as much knowledge as possible about whatever you’re doing in order to have creative autonomy. So together they work and together they play.
Part of the ingenuity of Emily Danger is that they see the intrinsic relationships between the personal and the universal. This understanding is something that has lifted many great artists from the fray. When I ask Nicholas about her dream-line up, her headliner does not come as a surprise. David Bowie is an artist known for, among other things, reinventing himself almost as frequently as Madonna. It’s never clear whether this kind of persona-hopping is due to malcontent or a keen business sense, or both. But what is clear is that the self-awareness and openness to keep pushing, keep exploring, is what made Bowie a superstar. And throughout each stage of his career, he had the emotional intelligence to write songs that transcended the gap between his intimacies and our desires. This kind of forging-ahead is evident in Emily Danger’s path so far, and although they may not be glam-rocking any time soon, I am sure we can expect the many incarnations of Emily to remain on the scene for quite a while.
——
Emily Nicholas’ Dream Line-Up (in order of appearance):
Emily Danger
David Byrne
LCD Soundsystem
Björk
Portishead
Antony and the Johnstons
Radiohead
Headliner: David Bowie
As some of you may know, I recently came aboard as a Film & TV staff writer for StageBuddy.com
I won’t often do this but here but I was particularly proud of this interview and excited at the opportunity to speak with such exciting young filmmakers. Here is an excerpt from my interview with Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, directors of “The Little Bedroom.”
Stépanie Chuat, left, and Véronique Reymond, right, at the Locarno Film Festival in 2010
I’m not so familiar with the atmosphere in Switzerland but I’m wondering if you faced any challenges as female filmmakers and if so can you talk a little about that?
Stéphanie Chuat: The first challenge we had actually was not connected to being women, it was the subject of the movie. The producers at the beginning said “nobody will go to the movies to see this,” but the film was a huge success in Switzerland so the producers were completely wrong.
Véronique Reymond: They said it was too heavy and we always said “no, no, no, it’s not heavy, it’s life.” and this was the most difficult thing. But afterwards, yes. It’s difficult to be a woman because you have to deal with how to direct, how to be the boss, it’s an every day kind of readjustment. We very much like working with men though.
Stéphanie Chuat: Sometimes men need to tell you how you should do things, you know, they have this patronizing thing which, I don’t know makes them feel secure, but sometimes it’s difficult when the producer comes to set and he speaks to the editor who is a man and he doesn’t speak to you and little things like that — I remember on “The Little Bedroom” one of the producers came and was speaking to the sound guy about some stuff which concerned us. But you know in Switzerland, the Quartz (the Swiss Film Award), which is like the Oscars, since 2009 there were nearly only women who were winning the best fiction film, 4 to 2, I think, so it’s not so difficult.
To read the full interview, click here. And to see my review of the film, click here.
Hello all, I’m interrupting the usual stream of blog posts about movies that have been made and are in theaters to talk about a movie that has yet to be made but is going to be great. My friend Jacob Bittens is in the funding process of his film Go To Hell, a short film about a man named David who gets sent to hell for being too boring. It’s going to be really rad and it’s Jacob’s thesis film and it’s really important to him and everyone working on the project. Please check it out and, if you like the concept, maybe donate a few bucks! Every dollar helps (and there are sweet perks)!
Let me begin by saying that I have nothing figured out. Really. Nothing. Someone threw a cigarette at me today, so let that serve as an example of how successful I am right now. But I am a person trying to be an artist, and when you’re trying to be an artist, your observations, thoughts and feelings are all you really have. So I’m going to explore some of those things here; primarily those thoughts about how to make good art and some about how to make a good life (note: I am aspiring towards both).
Film school is a very competitive environment, filled with lots of young, talented people intent on specializing and becoming the best at their chosen specialty. This is something that, perhaps because of my own personal flaws, always intimidated me. Many of my peers would set out to learn everything there is to know about a subject, refusing relationships and losing sleep in order to study the history of film, or cinematography, or to learn every name on IMDB. I never felt the best at anything. I felt like these were the students who were going to get ahead. How couldn’t they? They knew everything. Their movies were always the shiniest pictures in class.
An actor friend said to me the other day over coffee that, when asked if she would move to LA, she answered, “I couldn’t grow there, it’s impossible to draw inspiration when everyone is just like you.”
Michael and Marilyn in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely
There’s a lot of merit to that. I was always a believer in the idea that, where comes strife, grows art. If you know anything about the lives of some of the greatest artists of all time, it becomes a pretty evident pattern. I’m saying nothing new here; recently a sad and beautiful article from Cracked.com spoke about the correlation of depression in comedians.
Hardship forces a person to look at life differently. It forces those who suffer to become problem solvers, to lower or raise themselves to different levels than they otherwise might have. But I think it extends farther than that. I started noticing that the art I liked, from my peers, from my heroes, from my parents, was art that seemed to see through the contours of the human exterior into a deeper similarity that we all share. Diane Arbus is a perfect example of this. The subjects of her portraiture were almost always outcasts in some way, people who lived on the fringes of society. And she captured them as such, without judgement. In the image below, two “freaks” share a love that most might recognize in Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.
Freaks in Love by Diane Arbus
It doesn’t take an enormous amount of life struggle to be understanding of others, just a willingness to experience. That understanding is what makes great art. When the unique is made relatable, that’s when something great has been achieved.
I was trained in observation from a young age. My mother and I would sit at cafés and invent backstories for those around us based on very little. Anyone who watches Criminal Minds knows that you can tell a lot about a person by how they choose to represent themselves. The habit has always stayed with me. The more I got to know people, the more I recognized patterns. Of course, this is how one becomes judgmental. But the key difference between observational judgments and malicious assumptions is what you do with the knowledge. The key is not, as Stephen Colbert jokes, to be color blind but rather to notice color, and move on. Make a judgement, be willing to change it, but don’t ignore it. I was always surprised by my friends who got themselves into relationships only to realize (often times much later) that they had nothing in common with the person. This phenomenon, it seems to me, has to do with priorities. If too much time is spent studying what you already understand rather than learning what makes an individual compatible, subtle differences are bound to be overlooked. What’s interesting is that these relationships were usually born out of similar motivations to those of my film school peers. Namely, what looks good rather than what feels good.
From Frederico Fellini’s 8 1/2
When your major or chosen career path is repeatedly listed as one of the riskiest, it makes sense to feel the intense need to rise to the top. Only the brightest will outshine the rest, right? I believe that this feeling is what propelled so many of my friends to live on fast food, cigarettes, and as little sleep as possible in order to do as much work as possible.
Those peers so dedicated to their history books seemed doomed to miss reality. How can you write a relationship for the screen if you haven’t had one in real life? In fact, how can you write a character that is in any way different from yourself if you don’t regularly open up to the thoughts and opinions of others? Where does the inspiration come from? A lot of my friends burned out, losing creativity because they weren’t taking care of their mental, physical and emotional health.
What film school teaches you is how to use your medium, not how to tell your story. And that’s where a lot of my peers stopped. So many of their films had professional sheen but lacked any real soul. What makes art interesting, for me, is the artist’s personal take on whatever it is (s)he is observing. Fellini never worried about being right, it was about being interesting. Making people feel by poking at universal emotions through the strange and wonderful. Craft is only a tool for expression. The point is moot if there’s nothing to express.
The best artists, of any genre, are ones who came by their craft because they could not live without it. They could not express what they needed to without writing it down or putting it on canvas. Keats’ love poems were the only way he could keep his ties with Fanny Brawn; Van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was 27 and changed his style to fit his whimsy. It’s because of these greats that I feel like somewhere along the line, a lot of us are missing the point.
Lars Von Trier, one of my favorite directors, does not aspire to perfect craft. He will use a technically imperfect shot over any other because of a good performance. A good example of this is Uma Thurman’s now notorious scene in Nymphomaniac. In fact, technical perfection seems increasingly pointless. In a talk by Werner Herzog, he laughed at the idea of film school in 2014. “You have an iPhone, right?” he said.
Uma Thurman in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac
Many of us feel nostalgic for pasts we haven’t experienced. Hemingway’s barfights, Warhol’s late nights. The reason it’s even possible to make a Hendrix biopic without musical rights is because he had a life offstage. These people were curious. Max’s Kansas City was a place where artists would sit and inspire each other through conversation every night after working all day.
Those were different times, things were easier, people say. Yeah. And there was still a lot of bad art. But those people engaged in each other’s perspectives and learned about humanity so they could make things that appealed to the human spirit.
By contrast, there are many famous and successful artists who seem to live and create by one perspective, and there’s nothing wrong with that, if it’s a perspective people like. But what if it isn’t? Is that a risk to commit to before your 25th birthday? I’m still figuring it out.
I’ve just returned from seeing Blue is the Warmest Color for the second time. Before my first viewing, I was not aware of the enormous controversy that surrounds the film nor had I received word of its extremely explicit sex scenes — I had only heard from a friend that it was the most honest movie they had seen in years. And it is. I don’t believe that I have ever seen a film that expresses the complexity and raw emotion of first love as successfully. But it’s not the writing that’s causing a stir, it’s the sex, and I have to admit that it’s hard to ignore. Tonight, I saw it with my mother, and sitting together through the nearly 20 minutes (all told) of uncensored, unscored, uncropped lovemaking was a little hard to handle.
But in thinking about the experience, I’ve come to wonder why exactly it put me on edge. Let’s put the issue of homosexuality to the side for a moment and focus on the act of sex itself — or more accurately, its portrayal. I believe there are several things at play here, the first of which being good, old-fashioned, prudishness. Growing up in Connecticut, I was told there are three topics that are impolite to bring up at parties: money, sex, and religion. In testing the boundaries of my New England upbringing, I discovered that talk of money sours a conversation quickly, but that the latter two subjects can lead to great debate. Sorry, Connecticut.
Anyhow, I think that even in a theater in the West Village of NYC, a neighborhood notorious for its shirking of the Miss Manner’s playbook, this idea still exists. We are not a society entirely desensitized to the taboo, no matter how much we’d like to think so. And what’s keeping us from reaching that point is exactly the source exposing us to such titillations in the first place. Think of most movie sex scenes; they are lit with soft, complementary lighting, shot in suggestive close ups, and are usually accompanied by a romantic score. Generally, a sex scene can be achieved with as little as a bared collar bone. We accept that what we are seeing is sex, because that’s what we’ve accepted as sex, even if we are merely shown a thrusting silhouette.
There was an article circulating the internet recently that touched upon this subject in terms of the hit show The Bachelor. It discusses a shaky illusion of romance that covers up a mixture of debauched and Puritanical values. Many women vie for the attention of one man in the hopes of “winning his heart” – the audience is supposed to believe that no sex occurs on this show until the bachelor has narrowed it down to two prospects (with whom he sleeps one right after another). When one woman was a little too forward, seducing the bachelor before it was the appropriate time, she was admonished as a tramp. This is just one example of the media striking a weird balance between racey and utterly wholesome.
As a side note: this same bachelor has been revealed in recent news as a particularly boring genre of homophobe — brilliantly expounded upon here by Jon Stewart.
Because of this media puppetry, we are rarely exposed to true taboo. What I mean by that is raw, unveiled expressions of things that might make us uncomfortable. Perhaps, what I may never truly understand is why sex is taboo in the first place. Is it because sex, along with money and religion, has been at the source of almost all historical conflict? OK. If that’s true, why?
Let’s compare the topics for a second. In our currency based world, money is a means for survival, theoretical happiness, and power. If I had to guess, I might say that money has been at the root of almost every war in modern history.
Religion. Religion predates money. Religion was used as a means of education, explanation, and unity among people. A religion speaks to a person’s entire purpose, path, beginning, end, and how he or she looks at the middle. Even now, there are probably more people who deal in religion than any other kind of currency — except, of course, sex.
Sex came before both religion and money and is the ultimate unifier. Everyone has sex, or wants to — so why is it so off limits? There are hundreds of potential reasons as to why it has been made taboo (mostly political, I imagine) but is there something in the very nature of sex that’s repulsive? The answer may lie in something more personal. I believe that the un-romanticized sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color are uncomfortable because they hit the same buttons as the rest of the movie, just in a louder way.
Emotions in film and television are just as obscured and over-simplified as sex. The concepts of true love, love at first sight, love forever and always, etc. — these are concepts that unfold on the silver screen at a much higher rate than in reality. And I’m not saying that these things don’t exist, because I firmly believe that they do. What I’m saying is that the incidence of Lifetime-love-at-first-sight is far different than how it goes down in real life.
When director Abdellatif Kechiche hit us with nearly 3 hours of unapologetic reality, it ruffled feathers. Experiencing sex between two women at a wide angle, with everything on display, and no score to cover the moaning, feels voyeuristic. Without the veil of cinematic romance, we cannot comfortably sit in on their intimate moment. Just as we cannot (or I cannot) bear to watch as the two lovers realistically, and garnering equal sympathy, destroy their relationship because at the heart of it all, they just weren’t meant for each other. No love conquers all here. And the sex scenes are the same. They are emotionally complex, funny, and interesting — athletically impressive, even.
So perhaps we don’t talk about sex, not because of the political implications or religious implications, but because real sex, without fanfare or gesticulation, is far more powerful, the stuff of wars. It’s the moment when a person is most vulnerable and relating that moment to any sort of loss or shame may seem unbearable.
Now doubling the unfamiliar comes the fact that this love story exists between two women. Something that, in the context of this blog post, is hardly relevant but matters to a certain point. Already we are a society that is uncomfortable dealing with our feelings. It has taken years and years of cinema to catch up to the truths revealed by poets of the 19th century – and I would argue that we’re still far from it. Blue is the Warmest Color explores the themes of first love and self-discovery — universal experiences for all shapes, sizes, genders, and ilks. This may complicate the narrative for anyone who believes that homosexual couples relate any differently than anyone else on earth. They have all the same problems, all the same pain, and all the same sex. Maybe something Putin should watch. (ha! I knew I’d get Sochi in there somewhere!)
This, of course, brings up another point that I cannot ignore: the film was adapted and directed by a straight man. This fact has caused a lot of resistance from the LGBTQ community, specifically around the authenticity of the sex scenes. So maybe they are inaccurate, this is a subject I cannot speak to. Maybe the director pushed the envelope too far for the wrong reasons (a topic explored here by the New Yorker). I don’t know. I can only speak to my experience with the film as someone going in with no knowledge of the surrounding politics. And from that, I can say only that I hope for more. More reality, more controversy. And perhaps the latter will make way for the former to take hold. Until then, I will continue to offend at dinner parties.
**addendum: after finishing this essay, i realized that the three topics are in fact, “money, POLITICS and religion”. oops. but the concept still applies.
A while ago I posted this video as a silent project, and I was sort of happy with it. Now that it’s fully sound designed, I’m much happier. Please check it out!
SOPHIA HARVEY 