Darling of Cannes Now at Center of Storm

On the Riviera in May, the critics gushed. The graphic sexual encounters were so magnificent, The Guardian wrote, that “they make the sex in famous movies like, say, ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ look supercilious and dated.”

The Hollywood Reporter said the film would surely “raise eyebrows with its showstopping scenes of nonsimulated female copulation.”

Baz Bamigboye, a critic from The Daily Mail, meanwhile, confessed that he blushed like he had never blushed before, calling the sex scenes exceptionally beautiful. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m a bloke,” he added.

But now the film, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, is the subject of a multifaceted debate here and abroad that turns on two questions: How to represent the female body and lesbian sex on screen? And who has the right, or at least the authority, to create those images? The debate was set off when Julie Maroh, the 27-year-old author of “Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude,” the comic book-novel on which the film is based, criticized the film’s portrayal of lesbian sex as uninformed, unconvincing and pornographic.

“This was what was missing on the set: lesbians,” she wrote in an English translation of a French “communiqué” posted on her blog after the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

Though there was not a strict divide between male and female reviewers, some female critics have joined the debate, faulting the film for its idealization of naked female bodies in bed. “The movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else,” The New York Times’s co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis wrote in a report from Cannes.

In a telephone interview, Amy Taubin, a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and a contributing editor for Film Critic Magazine, said: “They are exquisitely lit actresses pretending to have sex. They are made to look ridiculously, flawlessly beautiful.”

“The film is extremely voyeuristic,” she added.

Female commentators on the popular portrayal of women’s sexuality acknowledge the difficulty of realistically depicting lesbian sex on the big screen. “A heterosexual male is never going to film two women except in his fantasies,” said Sophie Bramly, an author, film producer and founder of the Web site SecondSexe, which promotes women’s sexual pleasure.

Echoing Ms. Maroh’s comments, she said of Mr. Kechiche: “What does he know about lesbians? And how can you ask two actresses who are not lesbians to play any scene that is something other than his fantasies?”

As for the sex scenes, not all of it was as real as it seemed to many. Both 19-year-old Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays the younger Adèle, and Léa Seydoux, 25, who plays the more experienced Emma, use their flawless bodies to embrace, writhe, scissor and do other things on screen.

But was it all real? Not really.

When a reporter for the free New York newspaper Metro spoke to Ms. Seydoux of “several unsimulated sex scenes,” she interrupted and corrected him.

“Be careful,” she said. “They are simulated. We were wearing prostheses. Come on, you saw the scenes! But it was only a small protection. It doesn’t really change much.”

(She did not explain what the prostheses were.)

Mr. Kechiche did not respond to requests for comment. But in an interview with the Web site Flicks and Bits, he explained that his goal was to idealize the female body.

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

In Ms. Maroh’s 156-page graphic novel, the lovers look alternately sad, angry, tortured, messy and wide-eyed. They rarely smile. Unlike the actresses, they are far from classically beautiful.

The book, which won several prizes after its publication in 2011, will be published in English this fall as “Blue Angel” by the Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, British Columbia. The film will be released in France in October; Sundance Selects has bought the movie for American distribution, but the release date has not been announced.

In declining a request for an interview, Ms. Maroh wrote by e-mail, “I do not intend to feed the buzz.”

There may be a personal reason she reacted so negatively to the film: In her communiqué, she said Mr. Kechiche never invited her to the set or responded to several e-mails, and she sarcastically criticized him for failing to acknowledge her contribution when he won the prize. “I deeply wish to thank all those who appeared surprised, shocked, disgusted with the fact that Kechiche had no words for me when he received his Palme,” she wrote.

The Cannes prize was given to Mr. Kechiche just hours after masses of French demonstrators poured into the streets of Paris to protest France’s new law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption. While it would be impossible to say whether the protests helped determine the prize at Cannes, the coincidence of the timing was noted.

Le Monde called the festival judges’ decision on the day of the protests “an act of cultural politics that does not lack courage.” The weekly magazine Les InRockuptibles said that the festival “intervened with a perfect sense of timing.”

And Mr. Kechiche told Reuters, “Everyone who is against same-sex marriage or love between two people of the same sex must see the film.”

Ms. Taubin had a somewhat different take. “If you take the sex out,” she said, “no one would be interested in this movie.”