The film’s two lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux—who were jointly awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival along with Kechiche—spoke of the scenes, with Seydoux calling them “very embarrassing” and Exarchopoulos saying as much in different terms. Exarchopoulos—who plays the title character (the French title translates to “The Life of Adèle, Chapters 1 and 2”)—later addressed the excessive attention paid to the twenty minutes of sex in the three-hour movie:
I understand it. American audiences aren’t used to it. It’s a choice by the director. We all have sex, it’s like a drug, everyone loves it. We had to show how making love to someone is visceral. We had to convey how much of yourself you give over. So we chose to show to everyone the emotion behind the discovering of one’s sexuality.
We are adults, so come on. It’s fiction, it’s cinema. I don’t get the big deal.
Exarchopoulos’s conflicted feelings get to the heart of the matter: sex is actually never not a big deal, whether in movies or in life. Sex is the joker in the deck, the infinite variable that provokes, on screen as in life, radically divergent and wildly unpredictable responses and consequences. But Kechiche brought trouble on himself—not by the decision to film sex scenes between two women but by the audacity of his artistry in doing so. The problem with Kechiche’s scenes is that they’re too good—too unusual, too challenging, too original—to be assimilated (despite Dargis’s protests to the contrary) to the familiar moviegoing experience. Their duration alone is exceptional, as is their emphasis on the physical struggle, the passionate and uninhibited athleticism of sex, the profound marking of the characters’ souls by their sexual relationship.
Most sex scenes in movies are index-card signifiers, giving visual evidence of the fact that the characters have sex at a given point in the story but not actually showing much of significance about the sexual relationship. Thus—to pick an example now on screens—the banal sex scenes between the characters played by Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni in Claire Denis’s “Bastards.” Had Kechiche limited himself to quick scenes featuring the long-familiar pneumatic conventions of writhing and sighing, there would be little embarrassment and little debate. But, rather, he gave the sex scenes between Adèle (Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Seydoux) a roiling power and an emotional weight that are central to the story. The scenes are rough, tender, funny, and harshly searching—each of the characters gives thoroughly, exhaustingly of herself as she seeks, as if in severe and sincere questioning, what she can discover from the other.
via The Problem with Sex Scenes That Are Too Good : The New Yorker.
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