We’ve been running Blue is the Warmest Colo[u]r since Friday, and I’ve been keeping track of the number of people who walk out of it before the end. I put up a tally on my Facebook frequently and as of this post, we’ll have seven people who have walked out. It may not seem like much, but given the amount of people who’ve come to see the movie, it’s more than you might reckon.
Most of our clientele are older, retired types. They’ve comprised about half of the makeup of those who have seen the movie. The other half? Hip twentysomethings keen on seeing a foreign flick with some provocative imagery. None of the younger folks have walked out. All of our walkouts have been from the older crowd, which isn’t totally surprising. Those walkouts who chose to comment on their way out zeroed in on the racy bits, one man even offering up, “That is some of the most graphic sex I’ve seen in a movie.” And it may be, assuming the man has never viewed pornography.
I understand his subtext. He meant, “in a mainstream movie.” And I’m sure it’s true. It probably is the most graphic sex he’s seen in a movie. I didn’t have heart to tell him about Lars von Trier’s next effort, Nymphomaniac. But what about the rest of Blue?
The walkouts seem to occur about halfway through the movie. I confess, I’ve only seen snippets from when I peek through the glass from the projection booth. One sequence I can see giving cause for alarm occurs around this time, and it’s understandable that folks would become upset by it. In the realm of non-X-rated material, the scene in question is borderline outrageous. The positioning of the two female leads looks like something pulled from a scene in lesbian porn. Not porn for lesbians, per se, but porn involving lesbians. There’s already a running dialogue about the depiction of girl-on-girl relations on this film to which I have little to add. But what I hope to get to is why so many people would come to a movie just to walk out halfway through.
I’ll grant you the fact that the movie is 180 minutes. A couple older patrons have told us that they might have to walk out halfway through simply because they’re not sure if they can sit through 180 minutes of film, regardless of how engaging or revolting it might be. They stuck through it. But of the walkouts we’ve had, none suggest a weak constitution in the customer.
I’ll always remember my first: our first walkout looked noticeably disturbed. I was thrown off by the quick exit--there was still another 90 minutes to go of the movie. But out walks an older gentleman, wide-eyed and determined to increase the distance between him and the theater. I called out, “Have a good day,” to which he made no discernable vocal response, just a bewildered look in my direction. I turned to a coworker, bemused.
I don’t mean to mock the man. He did not have the Internet in his youth to prepare him for the horrors of the modern era. But look on his face suggested he saw something far worse than the passions of two young French women. It could have been the blue hair of one of the actresses. Or it could’ve been the unrelenting display of reverse cowgirl scissoring.
The man could’ve come in with prejudices towards homosexuality in general. Maybe not to the degree of blaming the destruction of Washington, IL, on the legalization of gay marriage in that state, but perhaps to that of viewing the gays as icky. I will not begrudge him his opinion. But what drew him to the film in the first place? It couldn’t have been the talk of sex. Sex is in all sorts of movies. The synopsis itself sounds bland: “Adele's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.”
Critics love it, though. The film earned the coveted Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival. It may be as great as critics would have you believe, though I can’t weigh in since what little I’ve seen of the movie might as well have been a clip on a porn streaming site. Critical acclaim and coverage in such periodicals as The New York Times is going to get a movie a lot of attention. Are these people putting in so much stock into the opinions of the critics that they’ll subject themselves to that which they may not be ready for? Possibly. Though surely the reviews these people read did not gloss over the dirty bits. Reviewers have a responsibility to their readers to let people know why this film may or may not be for them. There may be the few that make their decisions based solely on the arbitrary numbers--5/5, 90%--but I’d like to believe it’s a tiny few.
But then there’s that powerful force called morbid curiosity. Entire websites are built on morbid curiosity. For some, there is a will to be shocked to the point of desensitization. If you want to see how effective a drone strike is, you can easily Google it and bear witness to scenes of destruction and slaughter. Not all who seek such imagery are sociopaths (though there must be plenty), but they all have to share that kernel of morbid curiosity to push them forward, to expend that bit of effort to see something that will disgust them.
Only one walkout looked truly disgusted: the first. Another stifled back his shock and sat in our lobby reading the paper while his wife watched the remainder of the movie. Two older couples made their exit while expressing how flabbergasted they were at how far the film dared to go. Interestingly enough, the most vocal or noticeably frazzled walkouts have been male. Could they be disturbed that two women didn’t have men in their romantic lives? God, I hope not.
I myself have never walked out of a movie. I don’t know if that’s a badge of pride or a mark of stubbornness. Given the motherlode of information on the Internet about every film that comes out, it’s easy for me to gauge whether I want to see it. Even when a movie has completely lost me, I’ll remain seated until the credits roll because I’ve paid the same amount of money to sit in a dark room with strangers for a couple hours that I could spend for a decent meal at a fast-casual restaurant. Of course, that could change if I saw something that was so horrifying that my best course of action would be to make a quick getaway. But I’ve never been blindsided by anything of the sort in a movie.
But not all of the older people who saw the film were walkouts. As I mentioned earlier, one elderly woman whose arthritis could’ve prevented her from sticking out all 180 minutes of the film stuck it out. She may have been disgusted, or she could’ve enjoyed the film, but either way she made it. Another older woman told her friend in the lobby that the film was “very good.” In fact, it was the older viewers who more more vocal about the film. The young’uns emerged from the theater in silence, unfazed by what they saw.
Nothing they hadn’t seen before.
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