Those who express this concern seem to be reacting to the mere fact of a man filming naked young women rather than to the particulars of the film. I’m astonished at the concern on the part of some critics that Kechiche films the actresses’ sex scenes luridly or leeringly.
And the now-infamous sex scenes with Adèle and Emma have an athletic, non-sadistic violence that is entirely consistent with the filmmaker’s ideas: it’s impossible to understand a couple without knowing how their bodies imprint each other, and the nature of their mutual physical hunger and their physical coalescence. When Adèle sits at the dinner table with her parents as they watch television, their passive petrification in the image is largely formed by the game-show host’s voice. Whether discussions in the classroom, conversations in a park, or arguments in a schoolyard, the exchange of words comes off with the bodily force of an exchange of caresses, a playful wrestle, or a fistfight. The scene in which the two women’s glances meet is directed as if their gaze were a bodily push-the camera is jolted no less than the women are-and Kechiche’s version of psychology is that of the idea made flesh.
It’s a question that Kechiche poses all the more paradoxically inasmuch as the dominant aspect of the movie is physical. Thus their romance begins and with it the movie’s great question: What does it mean to be gay without participating in gay culture? Or, rather, is there such a thing as gay culture that differs from homosexuality itself? Does the physical and psychological fact of homosexuality entail a distinctive place in society? Soon enough, Emma shows up and protects Adèle (claiming that they’re cousins).