A graphic novel became a first this week, when its movie adaptation,  La Vie d’Adèle also known as Blue is the Warmest Color, won the Pam D’Or at Cannes this past weekend. However, Julie Maroh, the French writer of the graphic novel has issues with the movie with media reporting that she thinks her work has been “turn into porn.” The movie is about a 15 year old who falls in love with a woman and features graphic sex scenes, an issue that was brought up when it was announced as the winner.

Maroh took to the internets about her thoughts on the film and director Abdellatif Kechiche.

I don’t know the sources of information for the director and the actresses (who are all straight, unless proven otherwise) and I was never consulted upstream. Maybe there was someone there to awkwardly imitate the possible positions with their hands, and/or to show them some porn of so-called ‘lesbians’ (unfortunately it’s hardly ever actually for a lesbian audience).

Because – except for a few passages – this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling.

The heteronormative laughed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.

As a feminist and lesbian spectator, I cannot endorse the direction Kechiche took on these matters. I’m also looking forward to what other women will think about it. This is simply my personal stance.

If you read any of the articles floating around various websites, you’d think she was condemning the film based on her graphic novel due to male fetishized sex scenes (ie filming the lesbian sex to appeal to a male audience). Reality and truth couldn’t be further from this spinning of reality to create titillating headlines. If you actually read Maroh’s response, she’s quite level headed. She even goes so far as to praise the work.

It’s a master stroke.

As a creator she takes the stance that when the graphic novel she wrote hit stands for people to purchase, it was no longer just her story, but how people interpreted it. This movie is the director’s version and interpretation of the source material. She accepts that as a creator.

Maroh’s issue with the movie is as a woman and lesbian. In fact, in her letter she starts the quoted section with:

Now as a lesbian…

From what was portrayed as some condemnation of the film as a creator, instead turns into someone who doesn’t like how the lesbian sex scenes were handled. She also admits those scenes are only a few minutes of the movie.

I consider that Kechiche and I have contradictory aesthetic approaches, perhaps complementary. The fashion in which he chose to shoot these scenes is coherent with the rest of his creation.

That sounds a world away from what the Guardian would have you believe.

In fact Morah’s response was that of an adult creator who had issues with one particular facet of the film, not the entire film.

Whatever it may be, I don’t see the movie as a betrayal. When it comes to adapting something, I believe that the notion of betrayal should be reconsidered. I lost control of my book as soon as I gave it away to be read. It’s an object meant to be handled, felt, interpreted.

Kechiche went through the same process as any other reader, he entered it and identified in a unique way. As the author, I totally lose my control of that, and it would have never crossed my mind to wait for Kechiche to go in any particular direction, since he made it in his own, from a story that didn’t belong to me as soon as it was sold in a bookstore.

This was a disagreement with a director’s decision, and filming of a scene, but as she points out, it’s up to him to interpret those scenes within his vision.