The brouhaha surrounding “Blue Is the Warmest Color”—the epic
drama of a young woman’s coming of age that won the top prize at
this year’s Cannes Film Festival—has to do with three lengthy
and explicit sex scenes between the young heroine (Adèle
Exarchopoulos) and her older art-student girlfriend Emma (Léa
Seydoux).  Despite the scandale, Abdellatif Kechiche’s movie is
more properly about our appetites—for love, connection, life
fully and vibrantly lived—and how, at the end of the day, we
still end up hungry. The early sequences swooningly convey the
pleasures of new love, but the sex scenes are problematic, not
because they’re “shocking” (which they’re not, really) or
overlong (which they are) but because they’re an aestheticized
male fantasy. Full story for subscribers.   Get Access Now