When studios pick up films that win the coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, there is the tricky duty of selling what is likely to be a fundamentally art-house feature to a mass audience. So, once Blue is the Warmest Color, a three-hour French romance filled with graphic lesbian sex, took home the prize in May, film fans were curious to see how distributors would try to sell the erotic coming-of-age drama.
The green-band trailer released today is a much tamer representation of what the NC-17 drama will feature when it opens October 25, and it doesn’t quite sell the controversy that the film has been embroiled in since it won the Palme D’Or. Regardless, there is still longing, some cooth lovemaking and a barrage of recommendations from critics and Steven Spielberg, who was the jury president at Cannes. The critics’ comments tell how this film is a breakthrough for the coming-of-age tale, but does so without showing it in explicit detail.
Blue is the Warmest Color is the latest from revered filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche. It tells the story of Adele, a high-school student played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, who desires Emma, an exciting, blue-haired woman a bit older than her played by Léa Seydoux. The journey of Adele’s first love has been one of the buzziest films of the year, even before it won Cannes’s top prize. It was later greeted enthusiastically at Telluride and Toronto film festivals.
Blue is the Warmest Color‘s trailer, however, merely hints at the controversy. If the Weinstein Company had control over the film, the daring subject matter would likely fuel the marketing campaign a la The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction, another Palme D’Or winner. Regardless, the three-hour cut hitting cinemas this October is the same uncut version that audiences adored at Cannes this spring.
Check out the trailer below and comment if you feel it tries to cover up too much skin. (Perhaps a red-band trailer will hit soon…)