‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes

By Manohla Dargis. Photo: AFP. Source: nytimes.com

“Blue Is the Warmest Color” — an emotionally raw and sexually explicit contemporary French drama and critical favorite about a young woman’s awakening — won the Palme d’Or on Sunday evening at the 66th Cannes Film Festival here.

From the stage, Steven Spielberg, the head of the competition jury, announced that he and the other jurists had decided to formally recognize not only the movie’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, but also its two young actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. This unusual, perhaps unprecedented step acknowledged the contributions of both women, who appear naked in several sex scenes, but it also took some auteur sheen away from Mr. Kechiche, suggesting that the jury had engaged in intense back-room negotiations. For much of the festival the critical favorite had been “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a period story from Joel and Ethan Coen about a New York folk singer trying to make it in 1961. The Coens’ film won the Grand Prix, but they were not in attendance.