- Blue Is the Warmest Color
In yesterday’s post, I briefly compared the pleasure of delving into an epic narrative to that of preparing an elaborate meal. I could have noted that these pleasures often overlap. Two of the examples I cited yesterday—Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s recent film Blue Is the Warmest Color—feature lengthy scenes of meals being prepared and eaten. In both, these scenes deepen our understanding of the characters’ domestic lives—and, by implication, the social traditions they inherit. The banquets that punctuate Mann’s novel are highly ordered events, signaling the industrialist family’s control over business and public affairs. As the family slides from power, these meals become shorter and less celebratory—yet Mann achieves a poignant effect by having the characters continue certain rituals that remind them (and us) of better days.
How unexpected that a movie about young lesbians in the early 21st century would adopt the loping structure (and thematic emphasis on tradition) of epic family chronicles from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I wonder if the Oscar committee passed over Blue for a best foreign-language film nomination because, in spite of all the controversy it inspired upon release, it ultimately proved too old-fashioned.
