Running Head: CHANGING CINEMATIC VALUES 1

Changing Cinematic Values:

Behind the Failure of “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Huan Cao

University of California, Berkeley

College Writing R1A

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Changing Cinematic Values:

Behind the Failure of “Blue is the Warmest Color”

A famous director, award-winning actresses, and long-built buzz around its controversial

lesbian sex scene, 2013 Cannes Film Festival winner “Blue Is the Warmest Color” (BWC)

seemed poised for box office success in the U.S. After a steamy opening week, the year’s

highest-gross for a foreign-language movie (Brooks, 2013), however, things took a sudden turn.

Despite scoring a 90% positive critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, BWC closed with a bleak

domestic gross of 2 million dollars, barely reaching 4% of its global earnings (“Blue Is”, n.d.).

Everyone was asking the same question: How come?

For a long time in this country, tense sex scenes have brought an incredible amount of

people into the theatre. With “Basic Instinct” (1992) reaching an astounding 117 million gross

(“Basic”, n.d.) and “Wild Things” (1998) 20 million (“Wild”, n.d.), it seemed that the seven-

minute graphic scene in BWC should also play out positively at the box office. However, what

people were buying two decades ago, they are not buying today. According to Sydney Pollack, a

senior American movie producer and director, this is because movies change as the values of the

society do.

Experienced in moviemaking, Pollack knows that “American movies are a product” (para.

11), which is expected to bring revenue to the movie companies. Thus, the whole market-driven

industry relies on the free choice of its audience, and to attract viewers becomes the sole goal.

Further, Pollack argues that “the language of movie [is] a language of shared values.” (para. 3)

He believes that in order to interest its viewers, movies must reflect on the shared values of

society. But the values of society change all the time, for example, the idea of love is “a much

less chaste, much less idealized love than was depicted in the earlier films” in Pollack’s eyes.
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(para. 6) Therefore, only movies that reflect the current social phenomenon or trending values

can draw more empathy from the audience, and thus more likely to win at the box office.

Cinematic sex falls behind social trend for several reasons. Since the beginning of this

century, there has been a shift in the perspective towards female nudity and sexual depictions due

to the rising awareness of feminism. As feminists have made a great effort to clear the stigma

around the “mystic” female body and male fantasy around sexual conduct for years, American

people have started to notice that the female body is always used for entertainment or abuse in

movies (Keeps, 2000). Plus, access to pornography on the Internet further reduces people’s

overall interest in cinematic sex. Thus, movies like “Basic Instinct”, which succeeded mainly

because of their cutting-edge sex scenes back then, are not appreciated as much under the social

environment today. Unfortunately, the director of BWC seems unaware of the situation. Many

female movie critics argued the director was, “so unaware or maybe just uninterested in the

tough questions about the representation of the female body” (Dargis, 2013) and that the long

exploitative shooting of the sex between two actresses was “pornographic, reflecting a prurient

male fantasy rather than the truth of lesbian sex” (Scott, 2013). It is not hard to understand why

American audiences lost – or even possessed no interest at all - in BWC.

Another reason BWC failed in the U.S. lies deep in its theme. Pollack argues that, unlike

European movies, which exist to express an idea, American movies often narrate a story in a

common person’s life (para. 41-42). American audiences are used to a “triumph of the underdog”

story which is “affirmative and hopeful about destiny” (para. 43). Thus, like many popular

French movies, BWC had trouble pleasing the American audience. BWC is built on a love

tragedy between two girls, ending in an inevitable break up, but the movie spends a large amount

of time on exploring themes: female anxiety, eating disorders, adolescent depression and identity
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recognition. These themes are socially complicated and emotionally engaging; one critic

described them as “[dragging] the audience through fierce winds and soul-battering squalls”

(Graham-Dixon, 2015), but repellant to the American audience. While critics might love the

depth of the movie, the average American moviegoer who enjoys a simpler, lighter and more

straightforward story with a happy ending may not. It is just hard to imagine an ordinary

American who walks into the theatre for a relaxing evening to escape life would choose BWC

over “The Fast and the Furious”.

In fact, BWC did have an obvious difference between critics’ reviews and audience box

office. Pollack argues that the primary reason is the difference in standard for both groups as he

states that “the effectiveness and success of all [American] films [are] determined… not by the

particular validity of their message but by their ability to engage the concentration and emotions

of the audience” (para. 33). While critics are looking for the “validity” of the message – the way

meaningful themes are conveyed by the deliberate framing of the story, the audience just wants

to be entertained by the storytelling itself, whose aim is to “keep [them] interested without

seeming to engage [their] mind.” (para. 45) In other words, most people go to see Pollack’s film

“Tootsie” not for its brilliant way of showing the dark side of the American entertainment

industry, but for its funny plot about a desperate out of work actor dressing as a woman.

However, as for BWC, to serve the underlying tragic tone, most frames are bleak and shaky with

close-ups of the actresses’ facial expressions, and the pace of the story is extremely slow with

numerous scenery shots. Although these kinds of cinematography show the brilliance of the

director and win at Cannes, they also cut up and thus increase the complexity of the plot. The

audience now needs to make an effort to understand the movie, and that discourages them from

walking into the theatre.

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How come BWC failed to enter the American movie market? Pollack’s arguments

successfully answer the question. His idea of movies’ reflection on changing values – how they

change over time and differ between European and American audiences, and audiences and

critics - is and will always be shedding light on moviemaking in American movie industry.
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References

Basic Instinct. (n.d) IMDb. Retrieved from

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103772/

Blue Is the Warmest Color. (n.d.) Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved from

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blue_is_the_warmest_color/

Brooks, B. (2013 Oct 27) Specialty box office: NC-17 import “Blue Is the Warmest Color”

scores solid open. Deadline. Retrieved from

https://deadline.com/2013/10/box-office-blue-is-the-warmest-color-the-square-621276/

Dargis, M. (2013 May 23) Jostling for position in last lap at Cannes. The New York Times.

Retrieved form

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/movies/many-films-still-in-running-at-cannes-for-

palme-dor.html?pagewanted=2

Graham-Dixon, C. (2015 Jan 14) “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is the film that showed me what I

fear. Vice. Retrieved from

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpwqj7/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-is-the-film-that-

made-me

Keeps, D. (2000 Jul 17) Sex sells, says Hollywood. The Guardian. Retrieved from

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jul/16/features1

Pollack, S. (1992 Mar 10) The way we are.

Scott, A.O. (2013 Oct 24) For a while, her life is yours. The New York Times. Retrieved from

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/movies/blue-is-the-warmest-color-directed-by-

abdellatif-kechiche.html
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Wild Things. (n.d.) Bos Office Mojo. Retrieved from

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=wildthings.htm