Blue is the Warmest Color Not a Masterpiece but More than a Sex Film

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Blue is the Warmest Color: La Vie d’Adèle  (2013)

Directed by Adbellatif Kechiche

Sundance Classics, 179 mins. NC-17 (graphic sex)

In French (English subtitles)

* * * ½

The color blue is associated with valor, harmony, faithfulness, and confidence. It also signifies sadness and depression, Blue is the Warmest Color has very few of the first qualities, but quite a few of the latter.

Anyone who has heard of this film knows that it has generated controversy on several levels. First, it’s the first adapted graphic novel to ever win France’s coveted Palme d’Or, which it carried off at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Second, it’s based on a very graphic graphic novel. Here in the Land of Bible Readers Who Can’t Mind Their Own Damn Business (USA), any movie with nudity and people actually making love generates backlash. Add to the mix that genitalia (prosthetics, allegedly) are shown and that the people making love are two women, and hell hath no fury like a Puritan seeking to stamp out sexual pleasure.

You’ll probably have to find an independent cinema in a liberal town to see this one as, to be frank, the only way sex gets more vivid than what’s on the screen is if you’re actually having sex while in the theater. There is a seven-minute all-parts-bared, no-holds-barred scene between the film’s lead actresses that leaves very little to the imagination. This of course, has led to charges that the project is simply well scripted pornography–mostly leveled by those who’ve not seen it.

The basic plot is quite simple: boy meet girl, who meets girl and dumps boy. Girl eventually loses girl and spends a lot of time trying (and largely failing) to get over the loss. But it’s more than this. The film centers on Adèle (the radiant Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high school junior coming of age, confused about her sexuality, and  encouraged by her girl posse to bed down with a handsome senior guy who has been eyeing her. She does so even though she’s been having erotic dreams over a blue-haired woman she’s seen on the street. Adèle’s attempt to “go straight” does not go well. Not at all like what happens when she meets blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux), who turns out to be a fourth-year art school student and painter. To say that they have hot sex and that Adèle is into Emma’s body is a bit like saying that gourmands like food–a strangely appropriate analogy!

Blue is the Warmest Color is about way more than sex. Among the unstated, but clearly centered questions in the film is: What do you do when you meet the girl of your dreams and she turns out to be wildly inappropriate for you in just about every way except physically? Adèle and Emma are a gorgeous couple, but Adèle is immature, awkward, a dilettante, and spontaneous; Emma is cerebral, has been around the proverbial block, focused, and has a business plan for promoting her work. Moreover, Adèle, who longs to teach young children, is voracious in everything that interests her. When Adèle eats, cooks, reads French literature, dances, teaches, or has sex, she is laser-like in focus and a free-range animal in spirit. She also knows of no other artist than Picasso, a bit of an obstacle for Emma, who admires Egon Schiele and poses Adèle as Schiele might. And Adèle knows she’s way out of her depth when Emma’s art school friends are around and the conversation turns to anything other than food or the novels she likes. Among Adèle’s problems is that she simply can’t get her mind around things that don’t move her. Another is that she retains the spontaneity-bordering-on-recklessness that is part of the makeup of people of her age group (17-21).

Adèle grows into young adulthood and becomes a teacher, but does she yet know who she is? She has known deep heartache, but can she cope and does she have the capacity to move on? She has mastered joy, but can she navigate melancholia?

This is a very good film, though by no means a masterpiece. Kudos go to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux for bold performances that lay bare both body and soul. The buzz is that neither woman is a lesbian off-screen. If that’s true, a whole bunch of listless, unconvincing cold fish Hollywood lovers need to take passion lessons from these two. Among the possible problems, though, is that Kechiche’s voyeuristic direction invites critiques of the male gaze. I’d be tempted to give him a pass on that one, but not the film’s length. I generally appreciate the unhurried pacing of French cinema, but all complex stories elide time and a director must ultimately decide what to cut. Blue could lose almost an hour with little effort whatsoever. When we see Adèle eat spaghetti once, we know she loves it; we don’t need to see that scene repeated. Nor do we need to see her doing African dances with her pupils more than once. How long must the camera dwell on a tear-drenched face and runny nose before the audience knows the person is sad? When does an awkward moment become a drawn-out boring one? And, in the film’s last quarter, how long must we watch someone too depressed to do much before we realize she’s stuck? Blue is the Warmest Color is best when the heat is turned up; once the flames go down, it’s a bit like a sparse two-verse Delta blues song dragged out by an overlong guitar solo. --Rob Weir

Debi Smith: Songs for Shopworn and Overlooked Holidays

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DEBI SMITH

Hits & Holidays

www.DebiSmith.com

* * *

I’m on record as supporting unilateral drone strikes on performers who make holiday records. (Dylan’s Christmas album, anyone?) I am, however, willing to give the stand-down order for Debi Smith’s foray into seasonal merriment. First of all, she has a seriously great voice; it has depth, power, clarity, and chutzpah. No wonder she’s both a beloved solo performer and a mainstay of Four Bitchin’ Babes and The Smith Sisters. If you’ve any doubt about how good she really is, listen to her out-muscle a string orchestra on “O Holy Night.” We’re talking diva territory on that one. The other thing in her favor is that she has an expansive view of holidays—not just the mauling mall litany of Christmas irritants, but a calendar’s worth of offerings. I did not know that January 23 was National Pie Day, but I’m feeling festive about that one, and I’m as giddy about Smith’s cover of Doc Watson’s “Pie” as I am of her duet with Watson on “Keep on the Sunny Side.” They’re calling that a New Year’s song and that’s good enough for me. Nor did I know that March 20 was National Proposal Day or that May 4 was Renewal Day, but I’m glad she collaborated with Tom Paxton on the tender “Marry Me Again.” Canada Day coming up? Check out Smith’s “Niagara Falls.” Need a little something extra for Mother’s Day? Smith’s “Mother’s Hands” is rightly a beloved standard. Want to go a little over the top? How about “Chevy Impala” for Collector Car Appreciation Day? Mark your calendars; it’s coming up on July 9.

Rob Weir

Is 12 Years a Slave Too Depressing to Win an Audience?

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Directed by Steve McQueen

Fox Searchlight, 134 mins. Rated R (gruesome violence, nudity)

* * * *

Question: When is a historical film too accurate? Director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave films Solomon Northrup’s autobiography with faithful attention to the original and  no punches pulled in depicting the horrors of American slavery. No one can walk out of this film and think, as the Texas State School Board would have you believe, that slaves were actually “servants.” But the hard question progressives must ask is how many people will choose to walk into this film. The problem is that this powerful film of two hours and fourteen minutes often evokes sympathy for those who lived through past tortures by making modern audiences experience them emotionally. McQueen’s film may be too stomach turning to educate those who most need enlightenment. Put another way, the film may be a great history lesson, but lousy entertainment. (Before you jump on me for the latter term, remind me why most people go to movies.)

 When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853, slaveholders assailed it as fanciful propaganda. The release of Solomon Northrup’s 12 Years a Slave that same year added poignant verisimilitude to Stowe’s novel. McQueen’s film, recounts how Northrup, a free black family man and skilled violinist, was lured from his home in Saratoga, New York, to Washington, DC, on the pretense of joining a musical show for several weeks. In truth, his erstwhile employers were slave traders who wined Northrup until he passed out. He awoke the next morning in chains and was sold into slavery as a runaway. For the next twelve years, he was called “Platt” and worked as a field hand on various cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South. Only a happenstance encounter with an itinerant carpenter (Brad Pitt in the film) rescued Northrup from his nightmare.  

One of Stowe’s major theses was that slavery was so evil that even good people were dehumanized by it. In the film we see how Northrup (Chiwetel Elofar in what is likely to be an Oscar-winning performance) must learn to suppress his education, his eloquence, and his moral outrage, lest he end up hanging from a tree. His near hanging at the hands of brutal overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) is among the film’s gut-wrenching segments. To survive, Northrup learns to walk a shaky tightrope between self-preservation and deeply held moral values; in short, he has to be a bit like Stowe’s Uncle Tom in both positive and negative ways.

We also see echoes of Stowe in Northrup’s masters, first Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), the prototype of the master whose good intentions are ultimately overwhelmed by his intemperate spending and personal habits, and later by Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who is even more brutal than Stowe’s Simon Legree. Epps whips slaves when their daily cotton pickings drop from the previous day, has his way with the exotic Patsey (Lupita Nyongo), and tells his wife (Sarah Paulson) he will gladly get rid of her before he ceases having sex with Patsey. His is a plantation based on fear, scarred backs, and–when he deems it necessary–black bodies abused and disposed of with less concern than a farmer butchering a hog. The beating of Patsey is more horrendous than scenes from any blood-soaked slasher film because we know it happened and we cannot retreat emotionally behind a screen of fantasy.

Academics will applaud McQueen’s boldness, his refusal to sugarcoat, and his awareness of historical scholarship. The latter includes often-ignored details such as the ways in which slavery placed Southern white women in a bind. They were supposed to be asexual moral guardians of their homes, yet they also knew that their morality held fat less sway with their husbands than the availability of lustful coerced sex with slave women–a scenario that further degraded white women’s social standing. McQueen got it right; Southern white women such as Mistress Epps often rivaled men in brutality.

But let us return to the modern dilemma. As a historian I’ve little but praise for McQueen’s film; as a film fan, though, I’d never see it again and, as a teacher, I couldn’t use it in the classroom. Ironically, the question at hand is analogous to that of slavery: What right do I possess to traumatize another human being? I certainly want people to be horrified by the very thought of slavery. On one level, I’d love to see every member of the Texas State School Board locked into a room and forced to watch this movie. But let me recount my experience in the theater. I’ve been to plenty of movies in which people cry, but very few in which they sob uncontrollably. That’s what happened at 12 Years a Slave–heaving sobs and howling wails in which viewers were left gasping for breath.

Before you conclude that’s a good thing, let me also point out that there were only about three-dozen people in the theater. The word on the street is that 12 Years a Slave is endlessly depressing and I’m afraid that’s true. I recall debates over the 1993 film Philadelphia in which Tom Hanks played a gay man with AIDS. Some people were very upset by Jonathan Demme’s PG-13 depiction of gay life and the physical horrors of AIDS; they wanted the movie to be more “realistic.” I agreed that it was saccharine, but because of the kid gloves it made over $200 million, which means lots of people saw it, including (one hopes) a lot of folks who would not have thought about gay life or the AIDS crisis in a more challenging film. As any teacher knows, education begins when you meet a student where he or she is, not where you think they should be. We shall see how McQueen’s film fares, but it’s been out for six weeks and has generated about 10% of what Philadelphia earned. My question remains: When is a film too accurate? I think 12 Years a Slave is a milestone, but does it matter if the audience is little more than the usual liberal suspects? --Rob Weir    

Trust Me I'm Lying Raises Issues about the Message and the Messenger

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. By Ryan Holiday. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-59184-628-4.

This review first appeared on the NEPCA website.

How bad are things in what has been dubbed the “lame-stream media?” If Ryan Holiday is to be believed, Fox News is indeed “fair and balanced” when compared to online sites such as Gawker, The Huffington Post, Mashable, and BNET.  Or maybe not. One of Holiday’s major points is that what’s left of the mainstream media has been so drastically pared that it relies upon bloggers for news feeds, tips, and breaking information. That’s not a good thing. Holiday insists that trolls, shills, and liars like him populate the blogosphere.

The book title invites us to distrust Holiday and you should definitely raise your skepticism shields before plowing into his book. Still, given that Holiday pioneered and profited handsomely from some of the online media’s worst tactics, he’s at least a semi-credible source. The world he describes makes the days of yellow journalism seem charmingly innocent. Forget the adage that perception is reality; the blogosphere invents and commodifies each. A slow news day is no problem for bloggers skillful enough to tailor a rack of suits from a single loose thread. Ask Toyota, which paid millions of dollars for lawsuits, retrofitting, and manufacturing redesign when blogs began humming of stuck accelerators. In nearly all cases, nothing more sinister than operator error was in play, but soon every speeding yahoo on the freeway was blaming Toyota for his actions.

How did it get this bad? Didn’t open web gurus like Jeff Jarvis promise us that the information highway and citizen journalism would democratize information and politics? Holiday argues that “process journalism”–publish immediately and allow stories to evolve organically–gave way to “iterative journalism” in which a central message is put forth and endlessly repeated, facts be damned. The latter created a culture in which hits on one’s blog are more important than truth. Buzz sells and a well-crafted, oft-repeated story becomes fact-resistant. If you think buzz hasn’t replaced time as money and truth as perception, check out Holiday’s case studies–including his efforts to convince us that the generic offerings of American Apparel are high-fashion chic, or how he made millions for ‘fratire’ peddler Max Tucker by enhancing his misogynist image through a manufactured backlash.

In essence, journalism has been hijacked by advocacy advertising with all its inherent propaganda tendencies. When forced–and that’s the right word–to issue corrections and retractions, bloggers simply bury them at the bottom of websites where few will see them. Holiday categorically states, “Corrections online are a joke” (178). Really clever bloggers reduce legal liability through judicious use of weasel words: might, according to reports, escalating buzz, possibly, we’re hearing…. (170) But make no mistake; buzz and publicity are so potentially lucrative that no one can ignore the bloggers that peddle it. Holiday identifies the blogger’s nine tactics through which they win clients and influence the public, a list that includes: “tell them what they want to hear” (49), “give them what spreads, not what’s good,” (69) “make it all about the headline,” (87), and “just make stuff up” (113). Most horrifying of all is that these are often now the people who are the original ‘source’ of stories that appear on the nightly news or on the pages of the New York Times.

Holiday tells a distressing story that will be of enormous interest to journalism scholars and those studying digital media. Alas, I wish the study was better told. Toward the end of the book Holiday warns us of the dangers of “snark” (195), but that’s largely the tone of this book. Holiday clearly dislikes several other bloggers and, denials notwithstanding, it often sounds personal. What purports to be the confessional of an individual who has had a change of heart, comes off like one rapper dissing another. Moreover, Holiday’s conversion experience seems (note my weasel word!) to have occurred when he found himself and his clients on the attack end of the blog culture he helped create. His writing is both sophomoric and soporific. We should pay serious attention to the issues Ryan Holiday raises, but one longs for a more articulate reform advocate with a less ambiguous moral core.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

John Singer Sargent Watercolors Dazzle with the Light of a Man at Ease

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John Singer Sargent Watercolors

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Through January 20, 2014

Corfu Cottage

This review was originally published on the UMass History Department blog.

I know someone who teaches at a private school because it supports his folk music career, a yoga teacher who used to pay the bills through editing, and a landscape painter whose paychecks come from illustration work. As songwriter Charlie King once put it, “Our lives are more than our work/And our work is more than our jobs.” Keep that in mind when you venture to Boston to see John Singer Sargent’s watercolors.

And venture forth you should–there are nearly 100 works he produced between 1902-11 and there’s not a dud in the lot. These images are John Singer Sargent as few of us think of him. Sargent (1856-1925) was renowned as the portrait artist of choice for the Gilded Age elite, and small wonder–few artists of his day matched his eye or technique in oil and few in all of art history had his mastery of painting white on white or black on black. So good was Sargent that our mental images of late 19^th century upper crust Boston are largely conjured from paintings hung upon the walls of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

As sublime as the oils are, the MFA’s watercolor show is a breath of fresh air. Several forces collided that led Sargent away from formal portraiture and freed him to produce the bold gouaches, washes, and watercolors on display. First, as in our time, he who is in fashion one season is bound to be out the next. As Gilded Age society waned at the fin de siècle, so too did demand for Sargent’s services. He was, in short, yesterday’s painter. But a painter he remained–one who mastered the craft of the past and was vitally interested in the new. His oils occasionally showed familiarity with Impressionism, but his watercolors embody his love of the form. With fewer commissions that he had to paint, Sargent produced things that were personally meaningful.

Second, and more importantly, Sargent was as bored with society as it had become with him. He moved easily among American elites, but he was trained in Europe and was, in many ways, more continental than Back Bay Boston. The official story is that he was a bachelor, but he was probably gay. He certainly spent a lot of time abroad and was rumored to let his hair down considerably when outside of Victorian parlors. We see only echoes of Sargent’s audacious side in America–notably his scandalous Madame X  (1889), but most of the offerings in the MFA come from his overseas sojourns: the watery blues of Venice, the stark contrasts of Palestine, the blinding sunlight of Corfu, muscled quarry workers in Italy, the lush mountains of Switzerland….

Portuguese Boats

Call it reverse Madame X in that what he produced in Europe is only occasionally controlled. In a superb video at the end of the exhibition, painter Monika de Vries seeks to reproduce Sargent’s Portuguese Boats and argues that he worked quickly and impressionistically, as if he were a man freeing his hand and his soul. Forget the dignified drawing rooms of his oils; here we see louche gondoliers lounging in their boats, bold Bedouins glaring full-face frontward, carefree males plopped lazily outside a government building, and stone cutters smoking and enjoying their lunch. We get the idea that Sargent was probably more comfortable with this lot than the business class of Beacon Hill.

Above all there is the riot of color. Forget white dresses against a white background. In his watercolors Sargent gives us white laundry drying above a green lawn–except that lawn is splashed with pinks, yellows, browns, blues, purples, and mauves. There is a magnificent sun-dappled whitewashed cottage from Corfu in which the spidery shadows are just about every color except white.

Toward the end of his life Sargent had a last Boston hurrah–the stunning murals painted for the Boston Public Library. These too are better known than his watercolors, but once you see those, you’re likely to conclude that the happiest period of Sargent’s life was the one in which he was out of the public limelight and free to follow his muses rather than his commissions.

Rob Weir

Mist Covered Mountains Showcases New England Celtic Talent

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MIST COVERED MOUNTAINS

This Distant Shore

* * * 1/2 

Mist Covered Mountains is Québecois/Celtic fiddler Donna Hébert; her daughter, vocalist Molly Hébert-Wilson; and peripatetic guitarist/vocalist Max Cohen. Western Massachusetts locals will recall that Molly had an amazing voice when she was a tween; as a mature young woman, there’s added depth, luster, and sparkle. The Distant Shore features a few well-traveled Celtic songs, including “Fear án Bháta” and “The Parting Glance,” each very well done. Especially noteworthy is “Katie Cruel” in which Hébert-Wilson’s voice punches through a muscular arrangement in which Cohen channels Bert Jansch, and Hébert’s fiddle sizzles. Even better is Hébert-Wilson’s gorgeous and sensitive cover of Richard Berman’s “The Gifts.” Cohen takes the lead vocal on three tracks, including the hilarious hidden track “Hamster Heaven.” Make sure you don’t remove the CD until that one plays! Pioneer Valley residents can catch a CD release party at the Montague Community Hall on November 30.

Rob Weir

Magic from the Shetlands by FULLSCEILIDH

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FULLSCEILIDH SPELEMANNSLAG

500 Sessions

Spreefix 002

Fullsceilidh Spelemannslag is a mouthful for an ensemble name, but then again, it’s a pretty big group: seven fiddlers plus four additional musicians. Based in the Shetland Islands, Fullsceilidh features regional tunes, which means a blend of islands, Scottish mainland, and Scandinavian traditions. Think a more robust version of Fiddlers’ Bid, the seven-piece lineup of which Fullsceilidh’s Maurice Henderson is also a member. Unlike Da’ Bid–as Shetlanders like to call it–Fullsceilidh, has in the past, cleaved closer to home, though this release finds them venturing off islands to capture tunes from Liz Carroll, Martin Tourish (Altan), English dance tunes, and even some American old-time fiddle tunes. There are also selections that briefly feature instruments other than the fiddle, but whether it’s a local tune, an import, or a bit of guitar picking, Fullsceilidh renders them according to custom. This generally means giving tunes an orchestral treatment in which the musicians play in synch with each other rather than engaging in layering, harmonizing, or counterpoint. The tunes on the new recording are at once robust and full, yet communal in feel to the sessions playing invoked in the title. Solos are short and serve mainly as bridges back to the whole. There’s nothing simple about any of this, but Fullsceilidh makes everything sound effortless. Don’t worry about the pronunciation; it’s time for the world to discover these folks.   Rob Weir

PS: If you want to try pronouncing it, here is an approximation: Full-scale-é  Spelem-man-slog

And here they are in (considerable) action.