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A FILM BY by one of France’s top directors was heavily criticised at the Cannes film festival today, with critics focusing on the way it depicts its female stars.
Critics laid into Abdellatif Kechiche for the way his camera focuses and lingers on the bodies of his female cast and for a 13-minute oral sex scene in a nightclub toilet.
The director left his own gala red-carpet premiere after his leading actress, Ophelie Bau, left before the end. Kechiche picked up a microphone as the lights came up and said, “I apologise for having kept you and now I’m off.”
The 58-year-old director later defended Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo at a press conference where he said it was an attempt to “create the most free cinema experience possible”, praising his actors for having “fearlessly crossed boundaries” for him.
Kechiche also railed at an AFP question about the sex assault allegations levelled against him in October by a 29-year-old actress as “sick”.
He said he had a “clear conscience” and that the “new morality of our time disturbs me”.
Hist latest film is competing for Palme d’Or, which the Tunisian-born director won in 2013 for Blue Is the Warmest Colour.
The stars of that lesbian love story, Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, later complained about Kechiche’s behaviour towards them on set.
’Three hours of jiggling butts’
Kechiche said his film was an ode to “love, desire, music and the body” – but critics have been less than kind.
The movie was little more than “three-hours-plus of jiggling female butts”, said critic Boyd van Hoeij writing in The Hollywood Reporter.
David Ehrlich of Indiewire said “literally 60% of the movie is close-ups of butts”:
In Variety, Guy Lodge said that the film is “all but plotless”, with its female star “there primarily to be watched”.
A dismaying creative dead end from an abundantly gifted filmmaker, the new film escalates its predecessor’s cheeky protest to a form of acute auteur trolling.
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times proclaimed it a Cannes “disaster”:
Playing out in something close to real time over a single afternoon and evening, Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo is a numbingly obtuse experience, a feat of maddeningly indulgent non-storytelling hiding behind a symphony of bared midriffs and jiggling derrières.
New Zealand producer Patricia Hetherington walked out of the film, calling it “the most lascivious leery trash I’ve seen. Eurgh!”
Three other actors from Mektoub, My Love did not attend the Cannes press conference and Kechiche did not comment on their absence.
But a spokeswoman for the film said later that Ophelie Bau could not be there because she was making another movie.
Kyle Buchanan at the New York Times said that the director “leers again”:
A three-and-a-half-hour testament to twerking and oral intercourse, “Intermezzo” plays like the world’s artiest “Girls Gone Wild” video, and as his actresses doff their clothes to cavort on a beach and in a nightclub, Kechiche’s single-minded focus on their fannies proves so obsessive that even Sir Mix-A-Lot might blanch.
But the film also had its fans among French critics. Philippe Rouyer hailed the “actors who gave everything to play out this magisterially filmed trance.”
With reporting from - © AFP, 2019
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Wonderful news getting this off the streets.
@Derek Moean: whatever about the cannabis which is relatively harmless, good that those dangerous prescription drugs were seized. And as for the cocaine, whatever mixed white powder it is, one thing for sure is it is extremely dangerous leaving it controlled by a black market.
@Derek Moean: A quick phone call and you can have any of those drugs this morning for the same price they were yesterday. The same people who would have bought them yesterday will buy them today. This quite literally has zero impact on the market and is a complete waste of Garda resources especially when they’re cancelling 999 calls and failing to respond to urgent incidents. The insanity continues..
@Declan Doherty: definitely blame Gardai for enforcing the law. Imagine how much time they’d have to invest in other crimes if people didn’t use illegal substances….
@Paul Clancy: You are naive to think that human beings will not consume drugs. Its in our nature.
@Black Iron Tarkus: indeed. But neither could you expect society to exert no control over the recreational use of drugs really. As long as it isn’t allowed people use some caution, which holds it in check to a point but if that barrier was removed I could imagine a lot more problems with people under the influence of whatever they had taken. That said obviously the system that is there now is flawed and needs to be looked at. I do not think the answer is to think that because people will take drugs regardless we just let them at it.
@Mick Murphy: Not allowing something doesn’t stop people from doing it. If people want to take drugs they’ll take them regardless of the law. All prohibition does is drive it underground, create a profitable market for criminals and make it more dangerous for consumers. It also costs the state millions in a futile “war” when we could be generating significant revenue through taxation. We allow the sale of one of the most toxic, and harmful drugs on the planet while denying people the right to far safer alternatives. It’s hypocritical, it’s wrong and it needs to change.
@Mick Murphy: what are you basing your theory of people holding back when drugs are illegal? Is it just a gut feeling or is it based on the exponential increase in drug use since recreational drugs were made illegal?
With respect, I suggest your (and most people’s ) belief that illegality is needed to reduce use, is a fallacy with no evidence to back it up.
The next question is why you want use to reduce… if it is for public health and safety reasons, these goals would be best achieved in a legal regulated way.
If it is purely a moral point of view, that we just don’t like the idea of people altering their mental state… maybe that has no place in our laws.
People will consume drugs and have done since the dawn of time. It is part of the human condition.
@Paul Clancy, the vast majority of people who use illegal drugs do not have to commit crime to pay for their habit. How many robberies do you think The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Steve Jobs, Adam Clayton, Ronnie O’Sullivan etc had to commit to fund their drug use.
@Derek Moehan, oh yeah “wonderful” news, this will improve yours and my day, I sarcastically agree.
Who’s writing the prescriptions for that amount of tablet’s
have your say