There are few things Europeans, particularly the French (but also yours truly, I must admit), love more than mocking and denouncing American sensibilities regarding sexually explicit elements in movies, particularly in contrast to the liberal amounts of gratuitous violence in American movies. (Quite coincidentally, such sentiments seem to be the most vivid in countries whose precious national pride feels the most threatened by the dominance that Hollywood and American TV nevertheless retain in European cinemas and airwaves... funny how that works). So the media is having a field day with news like this - that in the state of Idaho it is apparently illegal for movie theaters to show the latest big French movie (and winner of the prestigious Golden Palm at the Cannes festival), Blue is the Warmest Colour (original title: La Vie d'Adèle).

The movie is plenty controversial enough for France as well, though. Lesbian love stories in major movies are still unusual enough to catch the public eye's to begin with, and the fuss about the copious and explicit sex scenes gained the movie instant notoriety at the time it won in Cannes four months ago. To top it all off, co-stars Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle) and Léa Seydoux (Emma) spent the interval between the festival and the general release denouncing director Abdellatif Kéchiche for his obsessive style of filming and his endless re-takes of the painstakingly choreographed sex scenes (technicians on the movie had grievances along similar lines). Kéchiche in turn complained that his stars' comments would prejudice the public against the movie; he of course neglected to mention that all the talk was unlikely to hurt his bottom line.

Having now seen the movie, I must say that Kéchiche, Seydoux and the until now relatively unknown protagonist Exarchopoulos all deliver achievements that make the decision of the Cannes jury (the Golden Palm was awarded, for the first time ever, not only to the winning movie's director, but jointly to the pair of lead actresses in addition to the director) entirely justified - but the reactions of the American censors, too, are understandable. It's hard to think of any mainstream or even arthouse movie that has anything like the ten straight minutes of sex in the middle of the movie, be it gay or straight - and even those who weren't previously aware of the actresses' complaints must start to wonder after a while if it really needed to be quite that long. It's not that it's gratuitous or cheap, though; merely very long, in a movie which despite its three hours of length often goes over things surprisingly quickly.

The movie starts fairly slowly and as what one might call a traditional love story, not unlike that other (but, despite its name, so much more innocent) lesbian scandal movie, Fucking Åmål, but Adèle and Emma's relationship is merely the beginning, not the happy end. Adèle is a high school junior (or the French equivalent of that, anyway), much younger than the fourth-year art school student Emma on whom she develops a violent crush. Somewhere along the way - the timing is left deliberately vague - Emma leaves her girlfriend for Adèle, and for several years they live together, despite the large differences between them not merely in age, but in background, interests, life goals and personality. The ending, much to the chagrin of those who have pointed out how big a cliché it is that lesbian relationships always seem to end in tragedy in fiction, is not a happy one (personally I was more angry than saddened, but reactions will vary no doubt).

Kéchiche's focus throughout the movie is on physicality in general and the contrast between the physical and the mental - it's not only the sex that is unusually explicit, but also things like eating (there are quite a few scenes in which the viewer gets a good and no doubt to many rather unwelcome view of what precisely Adèle is eating at that very moment) and the snot running from Adèle's nose while she is crying her heart out. Adèle's relationship with Emma is steamy and passionate in physical terms, in spite of - or perhaps because of - their difficulty in really connecting on a mental or spiritual level, and the lack of mutual interests that threatens their relationship in the longer run.

It would be unusual to have a LGBT love story without homophobia and social heteronormal pressure rearing its head somewhere, and indeed they also appear here, though in a somewhat bizarre fashion - Adèle's friends seem inordinately homophobic for this day and age even by teenager standards, and one in particular, whose personality had not previously been established in any way in the movie, is a caricature in her virulent hatred, without any further resolution to that plotline further on; the same is true to a lesser extent for Adèle's superbly tactless and clueless parents. This is the case for some other plot elements as well, as Kéchiche does not feel obligated to neatly tie off plot lines any more than to establish a clear timeline; one gets used to it, but it may irk some viewers.

Nevertheless, thanks in large part to the brilliant casting of Exarchopoulos and her indisputable on-screen chemistry with Seydoux (which makes the sex scenes look convincing even to those who know how aggravating they were for the actresses), La Vie d'Adèle is an at times flawed but still very beautiful and very good movie. Kéchiche may have hurt his future career with his stubborn and relentless drive to shoot the movie exactly the way he wanted to, by gaining a reputation for being impossible to work with, but in the process he did make a movie that will be remembered as much more than just another scandal film.