(That first sex scene alone apparently took 10 days to complete.) Seydoux, who is 28 and a far more experienced performer than the teenage Exarchopoulos, has described the filmmaking experience as “horrible” and said that at times Kechiche made her feel “like a prostitute.”

But it didn’t take long for the two actresses to begin airing their grievances about Kechiche’s tyrannical directing style, along with the exhausting working conditions of a shoot that lasted almost six months. Kechiche accepted the Palme d’Or, the film world’s biggest non-Oscar prize, alongside the film’s young stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos (itself an unusual move), amid all the customary kisses, embraces and tears of gratitude. What we certainly didn’t know in Cannes was that at least some of the controversy surrounding “Blue Is the Warmest Color” would arise in the form of bitter disputes among the people who made it. Those scenes were intended to be challenging and destined to be controversial, but they are woven into the film’s design, not the reasons for its existence. And I’m not principally talking about the film’s now-legendary sex scenes between two young women, the first of which lasts almost 10 minutes. Amid the often-superficial marketplace of ideas and the petty party atmosphere of that festival, where the line between art and commodity has long since been erased, Tunisian-born French director Abdellatif Kechiche’s spellbinding love story offered an unusually intimate experience. As I wrote at the time, it was remarkable how quiet an auditorium packed with 800 or so caffeine-buzzed journalists could get. From the first screening of “Blue Is the Warmest Color” at Cannes last May, it was clear that this was a movie that could and would provoke strong reactions.

Blue is the warmest colour scenes real