Blue is a Hot Color

We had an extreme cultural experience today.  We went to see a French movie.

And not just any movie, but La Vie d’Adele (The Life of Adele), which won the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.  Unanimously!  After only five minutes of deliberation by the awards committee!  And which received a glowing front page review in Le Monde!

Wow, we thought, this is going to be great!

We were wrong.

It turned out to be a classic French movie – it took three hours for nothing to happen.

Ok, that's not quite fair.  Somewhere in there was a tender coming-of-age story of a young woman discovering her (mostly gay) sexuality.  That took about 30 minutes. The rest of the movie was, um, rather slow.  It included a lot of:

Adele walking.

Adele sleeping.

Adele crying.

Street demonstrations.

Adele putting her hair up.  And letting it down.  And putting it up.  And letting it down.

Several long and somewhat ridiculous sex scenes.

Adele dancing.

Adele crying some more.

Adele serving spaghetti.  
People eating spaghetti.
People talking with their mouths full of spaghetti.

An ambiguous ending.

As we watched the movie we thought that maybe we just don’t get it.  Maybe our American sensibilities have been corrupted by too many movies that are nothing but explosions and special effects.  By contrast, the French would flock to see this pinnacle of cinematic art.  After all, only the French recognize the true comic genius of Jerry Lewis.  

Then we looked around and noticed that there were just six other people in the theater.

So...when does Iron Man 4 come out?

KVS