‘Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo’: Abdellatif Kechiche’s Torturous, Four-Hour Sequel Is the Butt of the Joke [Cannes Review]

The female ass is the main character of “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” and that’s not an exaggeration. After auctioning off the Palme d’Or statuette he won for “Blue Is the Warmest Color” in order to finance this film, director Abdellatif Kechiche returns with —  judging by its title — the second installment in a godforsaken trilogy. The rumors are true: “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo” clocks in at around four hours, each hour more excruciatingly mind-numbing than the last.

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There’s barely any point to recounting a synopsis, with plot taking a backseat to the film’s more obscene elements, but here it is: 18-year-old Marie (Marie Bernard, who’s a close ringer for a young Amanda Seyfried) is sunning on the beach during a family vacation, when Tony and Aimé (Salim Kechiouche and Roméo De Lacour, respectively) approach her, convincing her eventually to hang out with a larger group of ambiguously related, bikini-clad family members. Chief among them are Ophélie (Ophélie Bau, resuming her role from the previous installment) who is now pregnant with Tony’s child and insists that she will terminate the pregnancy in favor of starting a life of marital bliss with Clément, her off-screen military fiancé, despite Tony’s best attempts at persuasion.

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30 minutes of small talk later, the gang has convinced Marie to join them for a night on the town, where Kechiche languidly trains his camera on jiggling female bodies for long swaths of time, occasionally interspersing short bouts of conversation so banal, they’re almost as painful as the gratuitous ass shots. There’s little else worthy of mention in this middle section, which comprises most of the torturous four hours, besides the appearance of Amin (Shaïn Boumedine), the film’s resident heartthrob, who seems confusingly distracted, despite the handful of girls who spend the majority of the evening eagerly vying for his attention. To top it all off, somewhere in the third hour, Kechiche controversially includes a 10-minute-ish sequence of Ophélie receiving graphic oral sex from Aimé in the grimy nightclub bathroom, which seems, to put it euphemistically, unsimulated.

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If reading that much is painful, imagine sitting through four continuous hours of this, set to flashing multicolored lights and hammering bass lines, including a travesty of a “Voulez Vous” remix. (Somewhere in Stockholm, the members of ABBA are calling their lawyers.) After a certain amount of time elapses during which viewers are treated to the uninterrupted footage of a woman’s jiggling butt, a threshold is crossed and shock value vanishes completely. It’s almost as though Kechiche is training us to develop a total desensitization to scenes of salacious, oversexualized material; after a while, these body parts carry the approximate erotic charge of rubber chickens. Who knew that a sexual awakening could be so bloodless?

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It’s almost absurd to talk about the role of the male gaze in a film for which the male gaze is more integral than, say, the screenplay or the camera equipment. It’s the foundation on which the entire enterprise rests, and it doesn’t even supply the nuance for a worthwhile discussion. After about 30 minutes of close-up twerking, and certainly after the sex scene, “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo” begins to feel like a human rights violation, especially after the cast of “Blue is the Warmest Color” objected so publicly and vehemently to Kechiche’s directorial style. Though the sex act depicted in “Mektoub” is consensual, its seeming authenticity brings on-set methods of representing intimacy into question, particularly in an age of increasing sensitivity to dignity and respect on the film set.

“Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo” is so conceptually absurd that it almost feels like an elaborate prank from a director now facing a wave of backlash in the same place that once showered his work with accolades. Since its premiere, the film has earned 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Coupled with the fact that Kechiche has pawned off the Palme d’Or, this has the air of large-scale performance art, trying to make a statement about an artist’s reputation for making good art, or perhaps the way we reward and implicitly assign value to certain films over others. Why else would a filmmaker so capable of sensitivity make a crass, four-hour movie about twerking butts, other than to waste the precious time of legions of devoted cinephiles?

It’s almost impossible to stress how unpleasant this moviegoing experience was, to the point where it’s difficult to imagine a human being making this movie and considering it art. Or perhaps “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo” really is an earnest, unironic attempt at representing youthful intimacy. In which case, it seems that Kechiche is the butt of his own joke. [F]

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