Blue Is The Warmest Color: A Sentimental Wound

There is a passage in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room that still strikes me as a bit of a misstep in otherwise perfectly executed novella.   I have always been resolutely drawn to Baldwin’s warring worlds. I devoured Giovanni’s Room from the first, hidden away in the stacks of the library where I read under the dimly light halogen of the track lighting one winter as if smothering erotica into the attic by candlelight. I was enthralled by the sensual, elegiac way Baldwin captures the internal inferno of bisexuality. To this day, I’d like to hang my hat on so many of the confessional lines which remain deeply worn, much loved and heavy underlined late in my copy of Baldwin’s novella at the point when Hella has returned to Paris and our narrator is forced to confront his love for Giovanni: “I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire. Yet my sense of what I was doing made me doubleminded.  And at last she asked me, ‘Have I been away too long?’  ‘I don’t know’, I said. ‘It’s been a long time.’” 

Is that not the perfect loophole to capture the passing of faithfulness?  The old spatial temporal dilemma of love at a distance, time passed.  You went missing.  When I looked for you in my moment of transgression, it was as if you didn’t exist.  As Marguerite Duras reminds us in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, “In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don’t love you, have you noticed that?”

I was reminded of this passage from Baldwin the other evening when viewing Abdellatif Kechiche’s latest film Blue Is The Warmest Color. I was running to meet a friend after teaching and we arrived a bit late. BAM was crowded for a Tuesday night and we were still bartering for adjoining seats after the lights had dimmed and the camera had begun projecting its pictures. My first impression of the film was that it started in the middle of something, much like the late minimalist writers of the 80s, such as Amy Hempel and James Robison, the film seemed to descend like a fog, in an arbitrary yet intimate moment which overtook me so quietly I made the mistake of thinking it an extended credit.  (I’m thinking here of how Hempel starts her story, “The Harvest”: “The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.” Suddenly through her remembrance of this arbitrary word...