The other day my friend Kim and I went to the local art house to see the French film, “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” about a love affair between two French girls, one a high school student when they first meet, the other an artist with blue hair who’s a few years older. The movie’s been in the news lately because the sex scenes are very graphic and prolonged and in fact the film got banned in Idaho for being too racy. I think if someone went just for the sex scenes, though, they would be disappointed, as it’s really a very intense love story of how another person can imprint themselves on one’s soul, for better or worse. Some of the scenes near the end are achingly painful and the actresses are amazing, especially Adèle Exarchopoulos, from whose perspective the story is told. She doesn’t seem to be acting but rather channeling her desperate cravings from some inner depths.

The movie’s also gathered a lot of attention because the author of the graphic novel on which it’s based isn’t happy with how the film turned out, calling the sex scenes porn. And also the two young actresses have publicly complained about the difficult and exhausting working methods of the director, one of the actresses saying she would never work with him again. So there’s a lot of drama surrounding the movie, but as they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If you enjoy foreign films with a slower non-Hollywood pace you’ll probably be very moved by this one. Definitely worth seeing.