Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Body Music
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE: http://www.juliemaroh.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: French
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1985, in Lens, France.
EDUCATION:École Supérieure Arts Appliqués et Textile, Roubaix, France, B.A.; Attended Institute Saint-Luc, Brussels, and Royal Academy of Arts, Brussels.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Graphic artist and writer.
WRITINGS
Blue Is the Warmest Colour was made into a film, by Abdelatif Kechiche.
SIDELIGHTS
French author and illustrator Julie Maroh has published several graphic novels centering on contemporary issues of fame and LGBT romance. She lived for eight years in Brussels where she studied comic art at the Institute Saint-Luc and lithography and engraving at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her book, Blue Is the Warmest Color, about the life and love of two young lesbians, was translated into numerous languages and made into a controversial feature film by Abdelatif Kechiche that received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013.
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Maroh began writing Blue Is the Warmest Color when she was nineteen and took five years to complete. The story set in the mid-1990s follows fifteen-year-old Clementine who surprises herself for becoming infatuated with the older, blue-haired Emma she sees on the street. Confident Emma and shy Clementine begin a relationship even when Clementine is working out her sexual orientation. She should be hesitant, as her homophobic and conservative family and friends are not ready to learn she is a lesbian. When her parents find out, they throw her out of the house. The story is told in flashback in the 2000s as Emma reads Clementine’s diaries after a tragedy. “At a time when gays and lesbians in the Western hemisphere are enjoying unprecedented freedoms, Blue Is the Warmest Color explores the seemingly intractable prejudices that contribute to high suicide rates among LGBTQ youth,” according to Evelyn C. White at Herizons.
The story is about “the most accurate depiction of a real relationship that you’ll ever see–from the breathless, dizzying, spellbinding heights of falling in love to the frustrations, the moments of fevered, impractical behaviour, the pits of despair, and the ache of memory,” observed Alison Lang in Broken Pencil. “Love is a beautiful punishment in Maroh’s paean to confusion, passion, and discovery,” said a writer in Publishers Weekly. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted how Clementine wears her emotions on her sleeve, the sex scenes are graphic but beautifully rendered, and “the bulk of the tale is drawn in delicate black, gray and white with strategic highlights of blue.” Commenting in Studies in the Humanities, Doro Wiese explained that Maroh “establishes in her graphic novel a strong visual metaphor for an enduring love. At the same time, she entices her readers to share the perspective of a young woman who gives her heart to another woman despite the hostilities of her environment.”
Skandalon
Maroh released her next graphic novel, Skandalon, translated by David Homel, in 2014. Skandalon refers to a trap or obstacle, to which Maroh’s tragic Jim Morrison-like character Tazane confronts. A wildly popular rock music icon, Tazane is arrogant, selfish, and violent and succumbs to controversy and scandal. He acts out, causes riots, and does drugs. After he sexually assaults a fan, he is caught up in the devastating consequences. Maroh addresses the demons that can afflict people with power and fame.
“The book is beautifully drawn with fluid figures, in Maroh’s signature, rubbery style,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer who added that the character of Tazane was very realistic and believable, the kind that readers love to hate, and that the book was fast and engaging with a story that could have been expanded. “With her evocative art, Maroh really pulls the reader through the protagonist’s internal struggles,” said Teresa Potter-Reyes in Xpress Reviews. She also noted that Maroh’s illustrations demonstrate what an awful person Tazane is yet how he becomes vulnerable and guilt ridden later on.
Commenting on the sad and depressing content, a reviewer online at Quill and Quire observed how Maroh wanted to address the confluence of pop culture and myth, “but the rock ‘n’ roll fall from grace is so familiar that for this to work, the material needs to punch harder, or risk coming across as clichéd.” Despite the book being visually stunning, “the story falls short of where it should be. I admire what Maroh was reaching for …[however] Tazane never quite grasped my empathy. … I didn’t feel much about anything that happened to anyway toward the end,” according to a reviewer online at Comics Girl.
Body Music
In the 2017 Body Music, translated by David Homel, Maroh reveals the complexities of love in a collection of twenty-one vignettes that explore relationships among a diversity of races and sexual orientations and identities. Based in Montreal, the stories offer drama in different stages of relationships from first love, initial attraction, falling in love, long-lasting romance, lust, missed opportunities, and breaking up. Straight, gay, polyamorous, black, Asian, and Latino romances are depicted. “The characters in Body Music behave just like real people in love—bumbling along, second-guessing themselves and hurting each other—but their pure hearts and capacity for self-scrutiny set them apart from most of the lovers you’ll encounter in real life,” said Etelka Lehoczky in a review on NPR.
Knowing how the LGBT community is harassed, assaulted, and even killed, Maroh commented that drawing queer people kissing has become a political act. She admitted in an interview online at Paulsemel: “This project took me almost seven years to complete, and it built itself as I built myself and my own political awareness in that period. It’s possible to have a non-political reading of the book, because it’s not plainly mentioned. But it’s true that I explicitly aimed to put non-normative relationships at the same level with hetero-normative ones for political reasons.”
Jason Michelitch wrote on the Comics Journal website: “Her growing powers of observation and expression keep her scenes, for the most part, rooted in behavior and emotion, and though some scenes burn hotter than others, there is an emotional intelligence to the work as a whole that can only be described as mature.” In describing the book’s illustrations, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly said: “Maroh’s linework and ink-wash style allow one panel to flow into the next.” The reviewer added that the collection provides glimpses into the lives of a wide range of everyday people. “Beautiful, fluid, and impressionistic at times, the art brings the song of the work to life, depicting all the glory of love,” commented D. Emerson Eddy online at World Literature Today.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Broken Pencil, January 2014, Alison Lang, review of Blue Is the Warmest Color, p.48.
Herizons, spring, 2014, Evelyn C. White, review of Blue Is the Warmest Color, p. 35.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2013, review of Blue Is the Warmest Color.
Publishers Weekly, September 16, 2013, review of Blue Is the Warmest Color, p. 34; October 7, 2014, review of Skandalon, p. 78; November 27, 2017, review of Body Music, p. 46.
Studies in the Humanities, March, 2015, Doro Wiese, review of Blue Is the Warmest Color, p. 261.
Xpress Reviews, December 12, 2014, Teresa Potter-Reyes, review of Skandalon.
ONLINE
Comics Girl, http://www.comicsgirl.com/ (October 21, 2014), review of Skandalon.
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (January 15, 2018), Jason Michelitch, review of Body Music.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (November 19, 2017), Etelka Lehoczky, review of Body Music.
Paulsemel.com, http://paulsemel.com/ (November 13, 2017), author interview.
Quill and Quire, https://quillandquire.com/ (June 1, 2018), review of Skandalon.
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ (January 1, 2018 ), D. Emerson Eddy, review of Body Music.
Julie Maroh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Julie Maroh
Born
1985 (age 32–33)
Lens, France
Nationality
French
Area(s)
Writer, Artist
Notable works
Le Bleu est une couleur chaude (Blue Angel)
http://www.juliemaroh.com
Julie Maroh (French: [maʁo]; born 1985) is a French writer and illustrator of graphic novels, who originates from Northern France. She wrote Blue Is the Warmest Color (Le bleu est une couleur chaude) about the life and love of two young lesbians, which has been adapted in the award winning film Blue Is the Warmest Colour by Abdelatif Kechiche.[1][2]
Contents [hide]
1
Biography
2
Works
3
References
4
External links
Biography[edit]
After having obtained an applied arts baccalauréat at E.S.A.A.T in Roubaix, Maroh continued her studies in Brussels, where she lived for eight years. She got two diplomas there, in Visual Arts (comics option) in the Institut Saint-Luc and in Lithography/Engraving at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Brussels.[3]
Julie Maroh started writing Blue is the Warmest Color when she was 19 and it took her five years to complete it.[citation needed]
Works[edit]
Blue Is the Warmest Color[4] (Le bleu est une couleur chaude), Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013 - ISBN 978-1551525143. The title was originally published by Glénat in 2010 and received a prize at 2011 Angoulême International Comics Festival.[5] It has been adapted in film by Abdelatif Kechiche with the title Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
Skandalon (2013)
Brahms (2015)
Body Music (2017) "bittersweet graphic novel on the complexities of love"[6]
Darling of Cannes Now at Center of Storm
By ELAINE SCIOLINOJUNE 5, 2013
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Photo
Adèle Exarchopoulos, left, and Léa Seydoux in the film “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
Credit
Wild Bunch, Quat Sous Films
PARIS — Last month the film “Blue Is the Warmest Color” was the toast of Cannes. A drama about young lesbian love, it was so celebrated for its explicit sex scenes that it won the festival’s top prize. Since then it’s being castigated for those very same scenes.
On the Riviera in May, the critics gushed. The graphic sexual encounters were so magnificent, The Guardian wrote, that “they make the sex in famous movies like, say, ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ look supercilious and dated.”
The Hollywood Reporter said the film would surely “raise eyebrows with its showstopping scenes of nonsimulated female copulation.”
Baz Bamigboye, a critic from The Daily Mail, meanwhile, confessed that he blushed like he had never blushed before, calling the sex scenes exceptionally beautiful. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m a bloke,” he added.
But now the film, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, is the subject of a multifaceted debate here and abroad that turns on two questions: How to represent the female body and lesbian sex on screen? And who has the right, or at least the authority, to create those images? The debate was set off when Julie Maroh, the 27-year-old author of “Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude,” the comic book-novel on which the film is based, criticized the film’s portrayal of lesbian sex as uninformed, unconvincing and pornographic.
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“This was what was missing on the set: lesbians,” she wrote in an English translation of a French “communiqué” posted on her blog after the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”
Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”
Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.
Photo
A scene from the English version of the graphic novel by Julie Maroh, which is coming out this fall as “Blue Angel.”
Credit
Arsenal Pulp Press
“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”
Though there was not a strict divide between male and female reviewers, some female critics have joined the debate, faulting the film for its idealization of naked female bodies in bed. “The movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else,” The New York Times’s co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis wrote in a report from Cannes.
In a telephone interview, Amy Taubin, a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and a contributing editor for Film Comment magazine, said: “They are exquisitely lit actresses pretending to have sex. They are made to look ridiculously, flawlessly beautiful.”
“The film is extremely voyeuristic,” she added.
Female commentators on the popular portrayal of women’s sexuality acknowledge the difficulty of realistically depicting lesbian sex on the big screen. “A heterosexual male is never going to film two women except in his fantasies,” said Sophie Bramly, an author, film producer and founder of the Web site SecondSexe, which promotes women’s sexual pleasure.
Echoing Ms. Maroh’s comments, she said of Mr. Kechiche: “What does he know about lesbians? And how can you ask two actresses who are not lesbians to play any scene that is something other than his fantasies?”
As for the sex scenes, not all of it was as real as it seemed to many. Both 19-year-old Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays the younger Adèle, and Léa Seydoux, 25, who plays the more experienced Emma, use their flawless bodies to embrace, writhe, scissor and do other things on screen.
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But was it all real? Not really.
When a reporter for the free New York newspaper Metro spoke to Ms. Seydoux of “several unsimulated sex scenes,” she interrupted and corrected him.
“Be careful,” she said. “They are simulated. We were wearing prostheses. Come on, you saw the scenes! But it was only a small protection. It doesn’t really change much.”
(She did not explain what the prostheses were.)
Mr. Kechiche did not respond to requests for comment. But in an interview with the Web site Flicks and Bits, he explained that his goal was to idealize the female body.
Photo
Ms. Maroh
Credit
PIERRE ANDRIEU/AFP/Getty Images
“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”
In Ms. Maroh’s 156-page graphic novel, the lovers look alternately sad, angry, tortured, messy and wide-eyed. They rarely smile. Unlike the actresses, they are far from classically beautiful.
The book, which won several prizes after its publication in 2011, will be published in English this fall as “Blue Angel” by the Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, British Columbia. The film will be released in France in October; Sundance Selects has bought the movie for American distribution, but the release date has not been announced.
In declining a request for an interview, Ms. Maroh wrote by e-mail, “I do not intend to feed the buzz.”
There may be a personal reason she reacted so negatively to the film: In her communiqué, she said Mr. Kechiche never invited her to the set or responded to several e-mails, and she sarcastically criticized him for failing to acknowledge her contribution when he won the prize. “I deeply wish to thank all those who appeared surprised, shocked, disgusted with the fact that Kechiche had no words for me when he received his Palme,” she wrote.
The Cannes prize was given to Mr. Kechiche just hours after masses of French demonstrators poured into the streets of Paris to protest France’s new law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption. While it would be impossible to say whether the protests helped determine the prize at Cannes, the coincidence of the timing was noted.
Le Monde called the festival judges’ decision on the day of the protests “an act of cultural politics that does not lack courage.” The weekly magazine Les InRockuptibles said that the festival “intervened with a perfect sense of timing.”
And Mr. Kechiche told Reuters, “Everyone who is against same-sex marriage or love between two people of the same sex must see the film.”
Ms. Taubin had a somewhat different take. “If you take the sex out,” she said, “no one would be interested in this movie.”
Correction: June 7, 2013
A picture caption on Thursday with an article about criticism of the movie that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” using information from the festival, reversed the identities of the actresses shown. Adèle Exarchopoulos is at the left, and Léa Seydoux is at the right. In addition, the article misstated part of the name of the magazine where Amy Taubin, who was quoted, is a contributing editor. It is Film Comment, not Film Critic. (The two actresses were also misidentified on May 24 in a picture caption accompanying a critic’s notebook article about the festival.)
Julie Maroh: Julie Maroh is an author and illustrator originally from northern France. She is the author of Blue Is the Warmest Color, which was made into the controversial Palme d’Or-winning feature film in 2013. The book, originally published in French, was published in English by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2013 and has been translated into numerous other languages. She studied comic art at the Institute Saint-Luc in Brussels and lithography and engraving at the Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels.
‘Blue Is The Warmest Color’ Author Julie Maroh Not Pleased With Graphic Sex In Film, Calls It “Porn”
'Blue Is The Warmest Color' Author Julie Maroh Not Pleased With Graphic Sex In Film, Calls It "Porn"
Kevin Jagernauth
May 28, 2013 2:26 pm
It’s just been a couple of days since Abdellatif Kechiche‘s “Blue Is The Warmest Color” (read our review here) walked away from Cannes with the Palme d’Or, with the prize being shared by the director and the film’s stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. But the semi-controversy around the film hasn’t died down. In France, where gay marriage was recently signed into law, ‘Warmest’ only continues the fierce debate around the issue, and weighing in with her own opinion is the woman whose work without which the movie wouldn’t exist: Julie Maroh.
Maroh is the author of the graphic novel that was adapted into Kechiche’s screenplay, and taking to her blog yesterday, she has weighed in on the movie, and in particular the graphic sex scenes that have already caused a stir. Not only are the scenes explicit, but one particular sequence is long — so long in fact we wrote “as it ran on and on we found ourselves escaping the film’s spell a bit and starting to contemplate the spectacle of the flesh in itself.” But for Maroh, her concerns run deeper — here’s what she had to say:
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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 what he his creation. Sure, to me it seems far away from my own method of creation and representation, but it would be very silly of me to reject something on the pretext that’s it different from my own vision.
That’s me as a writer. Now, as a lesbian…
It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.
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 me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theater, 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 found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.
I totally get Kechiche’s will to film pleasure. The way he filmed these scenes is to me directly related to another scene, in which several characters talk about the myth of the feminine orgasm, as…mystic and far superior to the masculine one. But here we go, to sacralize once more womanhood in such ways. I find it dangerous.
As a feminist and lesbian spectator, I can not endorse the direction Kechiche took on these matters.
But I’m also looking forward to what other women will think about it. This is simply my personal stance.
And indeed, Maroh’s lengthy thoughts on the film are balanced and she clarifies that she chose not to be involved in the movie adaptation, and supports Kechiche’s desire to tell the story the way he feels fit. That said, she also notes that “tons of hours had been shot” and Kechiche “removed part of the middle.” She acknowledges that for the most part the director got it right, but is a bit surprised he didn’t mention her at all during the Cannes acceptance speech and Maroh is bit baffled why she wasn’t featured more prominently with the cast on the red carpet.
Lots of food for thought for sure. Give her full statement a read, in English, right here. [Thanks for Varga Ferenc at Filmklub for the heads up!]
Julie Maroh is a French writer and illustrator of graphic novels. She wrote Blue Is the Warmest Color (Le bleu est une couleur chaude) about the life and love of two young lesbians, for which she was awarded the Prix du Public of the Angoulême Comics Festival en 2011.
November 13, 2017
Exclusive Interview: Body Music Writer And Artist Julie Maroh
In her first graphic novel, Blue Is The Warmest Color (Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude), writer and artist Julie Maroh told a coming-of-age love story about two women that took place over the course of a fourteen-year period. But while her newest graphic novel, Body Music (paperback, Kindle), is also set in the romantic realm, as she explains in the following email interview, this time she’s exploring the diversity of those feelings through a series of vignettes.
Photo Credit: Zviane 2013
Body Music is a collection of vignettes. But what is the common theme they share, and why did you think this would be a good subject to center this collection around?
Each different vignette is a piece of the general chronology of a love story. They all come one after another in a precise order, and in a specific city: Montreal. These love relationships cross and meld in an urban setting. I started to write short anonymous vignettes in 2009, they only making sense only in this way — short narrative moments — so I decided to gather them up around a certain space and time, as if we were looking at characters crossing the stage of a theater.
Body Music isn’t just about the connections between men and women, though, but between men and men, women and women, and gender non-conformists. It’s difficult, because of what’s been going on lately, to think that there’s no politics involved. But did you just write this and it came out the way it did, or did you set out to make a point about people and relationships?
This project took me almost seven years to complete, and it built itself as I built myself and my own political awareness in that period. It’s possible to have a non-political reading of the book, because it’s not plainly mentioned. But it’s true that I explicitly aimed to put non-normative relationships at the same level with hetero-normative ones for political reasons. Knowing that LGBTQI+ people are harassed, assaulted, and even killed every day around the globe, mostly with impunity, holding your lover’s hand in the street can easily become a political act. Drawing queer people kissing is political, too.
Why did you decide to do Body Music as a graphic novel as opposed to as a prose novel or collection of poetry or some other format?
Because I’ve always been a comic-book artist, I wouldn’t know how to tell these stories any differently.
In terms of the writing, are there any authors, or specific books, that you feel had a big impact on either Body Music as a whole or on just one or two of the vignettes?
Authors or books, not that I can think of. Again, the process has started a long time ago for me, so it’s hard to remember the kernels of inspiration at the very beginning. It’s more of the politics and current society that have have influenced some of my narrative decisions. And also Montreal was greatly influential, because I lived there, and I wanted the atmosphere of the book to reflect the atmosphere of the city itself.
How about non-literary influences; are there any movies or TV shows that also had an impact on what you wrote about in Body Music or how you wrote it?
No, not really, not directly.
And how about the art, what were the big influences on art in Body Music?
From the beginning, I had a specific graphical vision of what I wanted the drawings to look like. So I gathered a lot of documentation and ideas. But actually, I never saw in a book or a museum the technique I ended up using in Body Music. It’s been passed on to me by a friend and based on linseed oil, and when I tried it, I realized that it was what I’ve been searching in my attempts for months. For every book, I have a specific mental vision of what the drawings should look like, and what kind of atmosphere it should transmit to the reader. This is why every book has a different technique, but it’s just verbally impossible for me to explain further, in French or in English. To me, it’s something too abstract and intuitive.
Margaret Atwood, the writer of The Handmaid’s Tale, recently wrote a superhero comic called Angel Catbird. If the opportunity presented itself, would you have any interest in writing a superhero comic?
I must confess that I’ve never been attracted by the superhero world. I’m not the type to be enthusiastic about justice-makers with big muscles or superhuman powers. If they really existed, I would actually be scared. From where I stand and what I’ve witnessed, I believe much more in the 99%, in the workers and citizens who gather together collectively to make a wall fall. I believe in non-shiny, almost invisible, non-muscular, humble people with their small, but important, everyday victories.
Your first graphic novel, Blue Is The Warmest Color, was made into a movie of the same name. Has there been any talk of making a movie, or maybe a TV show, based on Body Music?
No talks about it now. I don’t even think about what else it could become; my wish was only to create a moving book.
I cannot say what would work better, a movie or TV show. It would depend on the project people have in mind.
If Body Music was to be made into a movie or show, who would you like to see them cast in it if you could get anyone you want?
I really don’t think of that, and it would depend of the country where it’s cast.
Finally, if someone enjoys Body Music, and they’ve already read Blue Is The Warmest Color and your other graphic novel Skandalon [a fourth, Brahms, is not available in the U.S.], what comic or graphic novel would you suggest they pick up next?
I’m sorry, I don’t know enough of the English market to answer this question in depth. But I can recommend that you go buy Curveball by Jeremy Sorese. He found a very moving and strong way to talk about the aching melancholy of getting over a broken love in a science-fiction environment. Reading it, you really go on a trip far away and, at the same time, deep inside yourself, in your own familiar feelings.
Body Music
Publishers Weekly. 264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Body Music
Julie Maroh, trans from the French by David
Homel. Arsenal Pulp, $29.95 (300p)
ISBN 978-1-55152-692-8
Maroh, author of the best selling Blue Is the Warmest Color.; returns with another look at relationships, this time a series of 21 vignettes set in Montreal. Maroh finds beauty in the mundane and layers it with the complex. From the man second-guessing himself on his way to work the morning after a first date with a younger man to the chronically ill wife screaming at her husband, there's something relatable for everyone in this book. Maroh's linework and ink-wash style allow one panel to flow into the next, her use of wordless close-ups give readers a strong sense of intimacy and emotion, and the language is thoughtful and poetic. As a bonus, the diversity isn't forced: black, Asian, Latinx, trans, gay, straight, bi, polyamorous, old, young, and disabled characters are presented organically. This collection glimpses the lives and choices of a wide range of everyday people with insight and grace. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Body Music." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575678/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87a81924. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575678
Skandalon
Publishers Weekly. 261.43 (Oct. 27, 2014): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Skandalon
Julie Maroh, trans. from the French by David Homel. Arsenal Pulp (Consortium, dist.), $21.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-55152552-5
Maroh returns after the great success of her first graphic novel, Blue Is the Warmest Color, with a tale that follows the career of a fictional French singer/songwriter named Tazane. The book opens with Tazane at the height of his popularity. He is beloved by young men and women alike, and no matter what he sings or how he changes his work or how badly he acts, his fans stick by him. He begins to act out, abusing fans, causing riots, and doing drugs before shows. The story culminates when he sexually assaults a fan, and the book covers the fallout as the world turns against him. Tazane is a very realistic, believable character that readers will love and hate. The book is beautifully drawn, . with fluid figures, in Maroh's signature, rubbery style, with dream sequences and strange moments giving ethereal breaks in the text. The book is fast and engaging--maybe a bit too fast, as the swiftly moving story could have been expanded even more. Agent: Ivanka Hahnenberger. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Skandalon." Publishers Weekly, 27 Oct. 2014, p. 78. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A388565060/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2f00113. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A388565060
Blue is the Warmest Color
Evelyn C. White
Herizons. 27.4 (Spring 2014): p35+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
Full Text:
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR
JULIE MAROH
Arsenal Pulp Press
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Buttressed by the success of works such as Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, graphic novels, once considered an outlier genre, have become a major force in publishing.
Indeed, I count Tangles, by B.C. writer Sarah Leavitt, among the most compelling releases in recent years. The moving narrative of drawings and text details the author's relationship with her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother.
Now comes French author Julie Maroh, whose book Blue is the Warmest Color inspired a controversial movie by the same title that won the coveted Palme d'Or award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. While some critics raved about the film's bold depiction of lesbianism, others declared the movie prurient.
Rendered in diary form with flashbacks and extended scenes, Maroh's gripping graphic novel chronicles the romance between Clementine, a shy teenager, and Emma, an edgy older girl. "There must be other girls who feel this way," Clem muses, shortly after meeting her future lover.
The couple's steamy liaison is undermined by the homophobia Clem suffers at the hands of her peers. "Gay Pride again!" a friend scoffs. "How much longer are they going to be doing this nonsense?" The women are also challenged by their different upbringings. A free spirit, Emma rocks her blue-dyed hair with elan. Shaped by her conservative parents, Clem struggles to accept her sexuality.
She laments: "Ever since that night when ... I was thrown out of my own house, the night when my father, wild with anger said to me. 'If you leave with her, you are no longer my daughter,' I have not been at peace."
At a time when gays and lesbians in the Western hemisphere are enjoying unprecedented freedoms, Blue is the Warmest Color explores the seemingly intractable prejudices that contribute to high suicide rates among LGBTQ youth. As such, it is a valuable resource for parents, educators, clergy, counsellors and coaches who work with adolescent groups.
White, Evelyn C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
White, Evelyn C. "Blue is the Warmest Color." Herizons, Spring 2014, p. 35+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A369063719/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e5b79ec. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A369063719
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Publishers Weekly. 260.37 (Sept. 16, 2013): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Blue Is the Warmest Color
Julie Maroh, trans, from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger. Arsenal Pulp (Consortium, dist.), $19.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-55152-514-3
Love is a beautiful punishment in Maroh's paean to confusion, passion, and discovery. Clementine, a high school student, is in the midst of an identity crisis when she locks eyes with older, blue-haired Emma on the street. That moment keeps bubbling up in Clementine's dreams, drawing her toward a romantic truth that neither she, her family, nor her friends can or want to understand. Maroh's moody, exaggerated drawings and cool-hued colors give everything a dreamlike patina. Adolescent identity-seeking plays out against a mixture of heart-thumping decisions and brief but steam-heated romantic interludes. Maroh twists this potentially diagrammatic love story into a more operatic affair by telling it all in flashback, as Emma reads Clementine's diaries under the glowering eyes of her beloved's parents, who blame Emma for their daughter's death. Translated from the French, Maroh's graphic novel has already been adapted into a film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Controversy over the film's explicit love scenes (criticized by some, including Maroh herself, for being too voyeuristic and unromantic) will likely result in a lot of interest in this elegantly impassioned love story. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blue Is the Warmest Color." Publishers Weekly, 16 Sept. 2013, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A343531501/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fb5e66e2. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A343531501
Maroh, Julie: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Maroh, Julie BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR Arsenal Pulp Press (Children's Fiction) $19.95 9, 25 ISBN: 978-1-55152-514-3
From Belgium, the graphic novel on which the 2013 Palme d'Or-winning film of the same name was based. Clementine is 15 in 1994 when she sees a beautiful young woman with blue hair crossing the plaza. That night, the woman figures in an erotic dream, and her world is rocked. "I had no right to have thoughts like that." When she meets blue-haired Emma for real, she begins an at-first platonic relationship with the art student, who tells Clementine of her own coming out. The relationship turns sexual (graphically, beautifully so) and complicated. The story is told in flashback; readers meet a years-older Emma in the aftermath of Clementine's funeral as she reads Clementine's teenage diaries. The late-2000s scenes are somber and washed with blues, while the bulk of the tale is drawn in delicate black, gray and white with strategic highlights of blue. The text is occasionally clunky and purposive-"We do not choose the one we fall in love with, and our perception of happiness is our own and is determined by what we experience-"-but the illustrations are infused with genuine, raw feeling. Wide-eyed Clementine wears every emotion on her sleeve, and even if today's teens will feel that her mid-'90s experience is rather antique, they will understand her journey perfectly. Though a bit of a period piece, a lovely and wholehearted coming-out story. (Graphic historical fiction. 16 & up)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Maroh, Julie: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A341243836/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26fcfbe3. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A341243836
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Doro Wiese
Studies in the Humanities. 41.1-2 (Mar. 2015): p261+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Department of English
http://www.iup.edu/english/default.aspx
Full Text:
Blue Is the Warmest Color, by Julie Maroh. Translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013. $9.55, paperback, 160 pages.
Blue is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. London and Paris: Wild Bunch, 2013.
The key visual on the cover of Blue is the Warmest Color are the words: "Now a major motion picture" and, below and to the left, "Cannes Film Festival: Palme d'Or Winner." Obviously, the North American publisher of Julie Maroh's graphic novel wants to catch the wave caused by the success of Abdellatif Kechiche's latest film of the same title, also released in 2013. Indeed, Kechiche has adopted part of the storyline of Maroh's work for his film. Like the graphic novel, the film centers around a budding love story between two protagonists, the schoolgirl Clementine (called Adele in the film) and the art student Emma. Some characters, like Clementine's best friend Valentin, who helps her to endure the hardship of coming out as a lesbian in a world that sees homosexuality as disconcerting, have been retained in the film. And Emma has, in both the film and the graphic novel, dyed-blue hair.
Yet beyond those references to the storyline and some superficial transfers of visual elements, the film and the graphic novel do not have much in common. Whereas Kechiche's proclaimed intention is to explore the effects of class differences in his film, the graphic novel is fundamentally driven by the need to tell a lesbian love story in such a way that readers of all genders and sexualities can identify with its bittersweet narrative. In this it has been successful: in Rachel Kramer Bussel's September 2013 interview with Maroh for the online site Salon, the latter states that she receives e-mails and testimonies from people from all walks of life in response to her book ("Blue Is the Warmest Color author: 'I'm a feminist but it doesn't make me an activist'"). Thus, the graphic novel, more so than the film, successfully contributes to the acceptance of homosexuality by aligning its readers with the point of view of a lesbian protagonist. The graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color thereby makes lesbian lives, loves, and struggles visible, acceptable, and generalizable beyond the frame of a LGBTTIQ readership. This is an important achievement, given that homosexuality is currently criminalized in 76 countries, and that in 2013 Maroh's native France saw massive demonstrations against the planned bill for marriage and adoption equality.
What are the visual and narrative strategies that allow Maroh to establish her story as a point of reference for all genders and sexualities? Firstly, the vast majority of readers will be familiar with the subgenres that Maroh has chosen to work within, the coming-of age story and the romance--two of the most popular narrative subgenres. Clementine and Emma fall for each other, overcome some hardships, and would be happy ever after were it not for the homophobia that Clementine, especially, encounters at school and in her family. Secondly, Maroh has chosen to tell her story in very accessible visual language: her characters are depicted in recognizable, clearly outlined contours in which every line serves the purpose of capturing the protagonists' feelings and socio-cultural context. The narrative perspective alternates between an omniscient third person point of view, in which readers get to know the characters through their deeds and words, and a first person point of view, which portrays either Emma's contemporary or Clementine's past experiences (written down in the diary she kept as a teenager). Contemporary events are depicted in color, while the past is shown in sepia. Protagonists are shown in circumstances that most readers will know: in school, at home, with family and friends, in bars. All these stylistic devices are familiar to most readers through comic books, literary works, or films, and therefore make the style and content of Blue is the Warmest Color unchallenging and accessible. What allows Maroh's graphic novel to stand out is another stylistic device that is immediately highlighted on the cover: the color blue.
Since the nineteenth century, colors have been assigned qualities of warmness or coolness, and blue is generally characterized as being the polar opposite of the warmest color. In Maroh's graphic novel, this apparent contradiction is quickly dissolved when the reader learns that the phrase "blue is the warmest color" is a quotation from a letter Clementine has written to Emma in which the former dedicates to the latter her blue juvenile diary. Clementine's journal contains her "adolescent memories" (7), and when Emma begins to read it, the aforementioned love story begins to unfold in black and white (or, rather, in sepia tones), sparingly interspersed with items colored in blue. In the absence of other colors, these blue items are highlighted and stand out; they become extraordinarily eye-catching, and are charged with the intensity of an immediateness that is breathtaking. Blue thereby quickly becomes a metaphor for the will to determine and to define for oneself what is noteworthy and striking, and to whom one is attracted. In the graphic novel, blue becomes linked to Emma (via her colored hair); it expresses Clementine's perception of Emma as standing out against a "dull" background, a perception that has preserved its valence over time. Maroh thus establishes in her graphic novel a strong visual metaphor for an enduring love. At the same time, she entices her readers to share the perspective of a young woman who gives her heart to another woman despite the hostilities of her environment.
Blue is the Warmest Color invites its readers to partake in a vision that is tinted by love. And precisely because color has no stable value or meaning, Maroh conveys to her readers a generalizable singularity of love, an experience that her readers possibly share, regardless of their sexuality or gender. Maroh is coloring perception, and if it were up to her, it would not matter if we see our beloved ones in red, blue, or green, or simply in the colors of the rainbow.
Doro Wiese
Utrecht University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wiese, Doro. "Blue Is the Warmest Color." Studies in the Humanities, vol. 41, no. 1-2, 2015, p. 261+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A416300972/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5770efe8. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416300972
Blue is the warmest color
Alison Lang
Broken Pencil. .62 (Jan. 2014): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Broken Pencil
http://www.brokenpencil.com
Full Text:
Julie Maroh, 160 pgs, Arsenal Pulp Press, arsenalpulp.com, $19.95 CAN/US
There was much ado made about the film version of this French graphic novel when it won the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival this year--you know, the one with the seven-minute warts and all love scene between its two young female leads. Critics either praised or sputtered over the scene's rapturous solipsism, while queer women questioned its accuracy and wondered about director Abdellatif Kechiche's ability, as a straight male, to accurately depict the nuances of a lesbian relationship. (The film's two stars also alleged that he was tyrannical to work with.) I haven't seen the movie, and I do believe these conversations, in the context of this particular piece of art, are important and deserving of discussion. However, the buzz has also overshadowed Julie Maroh's exquisite, tender and thoroughly magnificent graphic novel, and that's truly a crime. Distributed in Canada by the mighty folks at Arsenal Pulp, I'd strongly recommend you get your hands on the source material for the truest distillation of Emma and Clementine's story.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
That story is insanely simple, by the way--girl meets girl, girl and girl fall in love, girl and girl break up, and then something else happens that I won't spoil--but in Maroh's hands it becomes a work of naked, heart-wrenching profundity. There are other threads, too--family and friend dynamics and sexual politics among them--but this is more than a queer romance or a coming-out coming-of-age story. This is about the most accurate depiction of a real relationship that you'll ever see--from the breathless, dizzying, spellbinding heights of falling in love to the frustrations, the moments of fevered, impractical behaviour, the pits of despair, and the ache of memory.
The writing is spare and thoughtful and every line of dialogue snaps with experiential truth. The art, too, surges with vitality despite the fact that 70 per-cent of the book is in black and white--save for Emma's hair, of course, and moments when muted hues gently seep into Emma's present-day consciousness (the story is largely told in flashbacks.)
Seriously, guys--I have a black lump of coal for a heart, and I wept nakedly for about an hour after reading this. I feel like I'm about to cry again now even as I write about it. It's hard to describe how simply and elegantly Maroh uses her illustrative and narrative touch to devastate. Blue is the Warmest Color is an experience that every lover--of art, of comics, of romance, of human beings, period--must know for themselves. (Alison Lang)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lang, Alison. "Blue is the warmest color." Broken Pencil, Jan. 2014, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A365736873/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7616d574. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A365736873
[star]Maroh, Julie. Blue Is the Warmest Color
Marlan Brinkley
Xpress Reviews. (Sept. 13, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[star]Maroh, Julie. Blue Is the Warmest Color. Arsenal Pulp. 2013. 160p. tr. from French by Ivanka Hahnenberger. ISBN 9781551525143. pap. $19.95; ebk. ISBN 9781551525136. F
French creator Maroh's Audience Award-winning graphic novel is a sincere love story told through the journal entries of Clementine, spanning her years in high school to adulthood. Despite Clementine's unhappy attempts at having a "normal" relationship with a boy, there is love at first sight when she sees the confident blue-haired Emma. Eventually, they meet and begin a relationship characterized by deep love but haunted by Clementine's difficulty in accepting herself and the depression brought on by her parents' and classmates' homophobia. Maroh's use of color is deliberate enough to be eyecatching in a world of grey tones, with Emma's bright blue hair capturing Clementine's imagination, but is used sparingly enough that it supports and blends naturally with the story.
Verdict Even though the setting is dated, Paris in the mid-1990s, and the fight for LGBT rights is just beginning to gain public awareness, the electric emotions of falling in love and the difficult process of self-acceptance will resonate with all readers. Some nudity and brief sex scenes are depicted. The French film version of the graphic novel won the 2013 Palme d'Or, the highest honor awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, which may draw general interest.--Marlan Brinkley, Atlanta-Fulton P.L.
See last week's Xpress Reviews
Brinkley, Marlan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brinkley, Marlan. "[star]Maroh, Julie. Blue Is the Warmest Color." Xpress Reviews, 13 Sept. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A346626704/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7694353e. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A346626704
Maroh, Julie (text & illus.). Skandalon
Teresa Potter-Reyes
Xpress Reviews. (Dec. 12, 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Maroh, Julie (text & illus.). Skandalon. Arsenal Pulp. 2014. 157p. tr. from French by David Homel. ISBN 9781551525525. pap. $21.95; ebk. ISBN 9781551525532. GRAPHIC NOVELS
In her latest graphic offering, Maroh (Blue Is the Warmest Color) explores more social and cultural constructs. Tazane, a world-renowned singer-songwriter, pushes the limits of his fans and the people around the world as he tests the reaches of divine success. Tazane is a wild and promiscuous musician at the peak of his fame; everywhere he turns, his fans follow and mimic his every move. Continually disgusted by how much his admirers worship him and his performing art, Tazane becomes a walking scandal, pushing others to accept him or deny him in all his violence and disregard. With her evocative art, Maroh really pulls the reader through the protagonist's internal struggles. The illustrations demonstrate that from one moment to the next Tazane is an awful person who becomes a vulnerable and worried soul by the end of his story.
Verdict As a rare English-language translation of Maroh's work, this is a must-read for graphic novel enthusiasts; however, the content may be considered too scandalous for some readers.--Teresa Potter-Reyes, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX
Potter-Reyes, Teresa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Potter-Reyes, Teresa. "Maroh, Julie (text & illus.). Skandalon." Xpress Reviews, 12 Dec. 2014. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A394184327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=35be4ff1. Accessed 12 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A394184327
Body Music by Julie Maroh
FICTION
Author:
Julie Maroh
Translator:
David Homel
Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 300 pages.
With an orchestra of players on the stage of the streets of Montreal, Julie Maroh conducts a symphony of the human condition in Body Music. Through twenty-one graphic-narrative vignettes, Maroh guides us through a stunning array of emotions as she chronicles the lives and relationships of people across the city. With few exceptions, each vignette is unique in the players it presents, giving a specific movement of discrete instruments, like a separate movement for each flavor of love. As such, each treats its subject matter the way we experience love for the first time. Some notes are strange, some sweet, comforting, others dark, discordant, and also propulsive.
Maroh runs us through all different kinds of love: puppy love, lust for sex, the feeling of losing your most cherished companion to debilitating disease, to missed love and ships passing in the night. No form is off the score. So too are the players diverse.
Maroh’s artwork is also harmonious. Beautiful, fluid, and impressionistic at times, the art brings the song of the work to life, depicting all the glory of love. At times it changes slightly to fit the differing themes of the vignette. In one vignette, her art takes on a darker, more abstract appearance in a story dealing with love as interpreted through First Nations’ folk culture. In another, the art bears a more realistic, harder edge during one of the silent sequences, telling the story fully through the art. The art also represents a hidden love, Montreal itself.
D. Emerson Eddy
Hamilton, Ontario
In 'Body Music,' Love Is Sweet, Sexy And A Touch Sentimental
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November 19, 20177:00 AM ET
Etelka Lehoczky
Body Music
by Julie Maroh and David Homel
Paperback, 300 pages
purchase
What a treat to see Julie Maroh once again writing about young love! It's hardly an unexplored topic, but the French artist has a knack for making it crackle. In her 2010 graphic novel Blue Is The Warmest Color, the emotions that sparked when the main characters locked eyes practically burned up the pages. That book was far from perfect, but it was easy to see why it won such wide acclaim and inspired an award-winning movie.
Now comes Body Music, a collection of 21 vignettes about love. Like Blue, it's not without problems, but Maroh's earnest romanticism buoys it over the trouble spots. Her compassion for human foibles made Blue's tale of two average French girls stand out among a million other love stories. As in that book, the characters in Body Music behave just like real people in love — bumbling along, second-guessing themselves and hurting each other — but their pure hearts and capacity for self-scrutiny set them apart from most of the lovers you'll encounter in real life. How often, really, do we act as our best selves in our amorous pursuits? Maroh imagines a world in which we almost always do.
The stories here are simple. Two people click at a baseball game in a city park. A cyclist stews about a lovers' quarrel. A couple try to recreate the conditions under which they first met. Maroh brings fervent lyricism to each situation, vaulting the characters into flights of eloquence. She writes like that intense, interestingly dressed girl from your high school who was always scribbling poetry in the back of her math notebook — only she's a lot nicer. When the brooding cyclist catches his front wheel in a hole and falls off his bike, he thinks not of his limbs but of his love. "It's physical — the terror of watching our relationship slip between our fingers like water, and we can't hold it back," he muses, lying on the ground. "Do we have to get this low to finally understand that the other person matters?"
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Sentiments like this border on sappiness, and sometimes descend into it, but Maroh manages to makes the book work anyway. She's just so achingly sincere in her fondness for her characters, you feel like the worst kind of cynic for resisting her.
Her skill at, and interest in, drawing faces is a big help in keeping cynicism at bay. Instead of aiming, like many comic artists, to encapsulate each character through a few repetitive devices, she seems to build up each face from scratch. She standardizes some things, but she'll subtly alter a figure's mouth or eyebrows each time she draws them. The characters' faces change so much according to their feelings, they sometimes seem like different people from one panel to the next. It lends tremendous interest to stories in which they're just puttering around or lying in bed, thinking and talking about the objects of their affections.
'Body Music' may be a little too sugary, but its sweetness is craveable for good reason.
Not that they're all talk. Maroh injects plenty of steam, too. An explicit lesbian love scene, two men's flirtation on a dancefloor and other erotic moments are deeply intimate, making the reader feel a bit of an intruder's thrill. Other times, though, Maroh all too clearly addresses her audience; in some stories — particularly those about polyamory and transgender identity — the characters are so noble, they start to sound like goody-two-shoes types in a kids' book meant to inculcate enlightened values.
But that's understandable. It's hard to be idealistic without giving way to preachiness from time to time. Body Music may be a little too sugary, but its sweetness is craveable for good reason.
Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Salon.com. She tweets at @EtelkaL.
Body Music
Julie Maroh
Arsenal Pulp
$26.95, 300 pages
BUY IT NOW
REVIEWED BY Jason Michelitch Jan 15, 2018
When one hears that Julie Maroh's new book is titled Body Music (Corps Sonores), it is perhaps inevitable to move from the suggestion of rhythmically moving flesh to thoughts of her debut work, the sexually frank romance-tragedy Blue is the Warmest Color (Le bleu est une coleur chaude). Specifically, one might think of the Palm D'Or-winning film adaptation of the same name*, which secured fifteen minutes of infamy for containing a long sex scene in which the lesbian lovemaking of Maroh's book is revisualized through a heavy screen of heterosexual pornographic conventions. The phrase "Body Music" would seem to promise further ventures into the sensual. After reading the book, however, the title takes on the character of a sly joke on the prurient interest that her earlier work is now inescapably saddled with. Though Maroh returns to the themes of sex, love, and LGBTQ representation, her latest work is a very different kind of book from Blue is the Warmest Color -- in some ways, it is a book that seems to be trying to be different, to break away.
A young artist trying to escape the gravitational pull of an early success, especially one anchored to another artist's partially incongruous adaptation, is not so unusual a phenomenon. During the wave of hot takes following the movie's release, Maroh felt compelled to release a statement that both supported the film as a whole (calling it a "master stroke") and criticized the handling of the sex scenes (writing that "what was missing on the set" was actual lesbians.) Maroh now seems understandably weary and/or wary of discussing the film, and her website's standing FAQ preemptively directs the reader to her 2013 statement as her final word on the subject, with thanks in advance for not contacting her about it further. Her follow-up work, Skandalon, was pointedly marketed as "a startling change of pace," a slogan which may well be code for "don't pigeonhole me." The changes evident in Maroh's second and third books, however, are not merely reactive, but progressive as well. They are signs of an artist who is growing and developing, and whose style is shifting not for the sake of novelty, but to reflect deepening interests, rising confidence, and more complex powers of observation.
Body Music is an exploration of romantic love, set in present-day Montreal, and told through twenty-one vignettes. The stories contain a diverse spread of types of people (across ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities, physical abilities) and types of relationships (from committed monogamy to one-night stands to various polyamories). Body Music has an obvious political project of representation. Such projects, while almost always well intentioned (though occasionally baldly cynical), can often become cloying or suffocating, a work bending over backwards to show you its politically correct bona fides while neglecting to do the work of storytelling, reflection, or imagination. Such is not the case here, or at least, very rarely the case. Maroh’s commitment to the individuality of her characters as physical beings precludes her from treating any of them as representatives of their particular identity group, even when they are directly (sometimes didactically) discussing that identity with others. Her growing powers of observation and expression keep her scenes, for the most part, rooted in behavior and emotion, and though some scenes burn hotter than others, there is an emotional intelligence to the work as a whole that can only be described as mature.
Blue is the Warmest Color, though accomplished, was very much the work of a young, unformed artist. Maroh reportedly started work on it at the age of nineteen. She was well into her twenties by the time the book was finished and published, but there is a certain blunt sentimentality to the work that shows the teenaged emotional understandings still coursing through its DNA. The book also rests on a pair of artistic crutches -- the narrative structure of young adult romance, and the visual qualities of shojo manga -- which, while serviceable, are also a limit on Maroh's ability to manifest her own voice (and eye). Skandalon was, as advertised, a change of pace, telling the story of a male rock-n-roll superstar approaching self-destruction, and adopting a thicker, heavier art style, more robustly colored, shaded, and shaped, reminiscent at times of the painter Gauguin. If her first two books saw an artist growing and experimenting with influences, he third book shows her hitting on something closer to being her own.
The visual style in Body Music is an assured synthesis of a fine arts attention to line and texture, and a cartoonist's vocabulary of caricature and iconic shorthand. The title calls attention to one of Maroh's major aesthetic preoccupations: body language. All of Maroh's work shows an interest in the expressive capacities of everyday body movements, and her characters have always been excellent "actors" on the page, but Body Music displays a higher facility with the human form and its behaviors, surely the fruits of a continued focus on life drawing, of attention paid to how human bodies actually move and think and feel as opposed to how they tend to perform in more clichéd drawings. Her firmer grasp on naturalistic figures also makes it so that when she does shift into a “cartoony” register, the tones meld and complement one another, as she knows just what parts of the body to deform for what expressive purposes, and how much transformation the verisimilitude of the figure can withstand.
Maroh’s development is not merely technical. Her greater powers of physical observation are reflected in the emotional nuance and complexity she crafts throughout Body Music. Here, the structure of the narrative may be to her advantage. Whereas her first two books were single, sweeping stories with central figures who become to some degree larger than life, in Body Music the narrative is fragmented into vignettes, most of which turn on small moments, some climactic, some elliptic, some triumphant, tragic, or comic. The dispersion of narrative emphasis among almost two dozen characters and situations allows Maroh to select scenes for the particular emotional ideas they explore, and to explore a wide variety of such ideas, without getting bogged down into the kind of ornate or overwrought plot that would likely result from exploring all of these ideas in one story.
This is not to say that a work could not explore as many, if not more, emotional ideas in one plot, but it would require a more deft touch than Maroh currently possesses. Though she has developed, she is not completely removed from the overly earnest emotional vibrato of her earlier works, and it is likely the episodic nature of Body Music that prevents that quality from congealing and choking the book. Though it is worth noting that “earnestness” becomes somewhat difficult to judge when one factors in translation – perhaps some of her dialogue is more subtle or poetic in the original French? And Maroh does not seem completely unaware of her penchant for bluntness: one story in Body Music depicts a group of twenty-somethings having a rather didactic back-and-forth about polyamory that recalls other equally blunt or didactic conversations about various romantic or social issues in other stories. Here, however, as the argument continues, Maroh depicts the participants as various historical figures engaged in debate or combat – Roman senators, medieval knights, Enlightenment revolutionaries – and moreover, the friends in the group who have not joined into the argument are depicted in these scenes too, made up to look as if they belong to the tableau, but their faces and bodies betraying their total boredom or disengagement from the conversation. The witty self-mockery suggests Maroh understands that she comes across as perhaps strident at times, but is willing to court ridiculousness for the sake of expressing her ideas, and is also willing to laugh at herself for doing so.
What’s more, it is possible that Maroh is more than merely aware of an occasional failing on her part; rather, the blunt or impersonal nature her dialogue assumes at times could be a part of the overall pattern of meaning in the book. The prologue to the book offers up, as metaphor for the universal and repetitious nature of romance, a mass transit map – a visual route that everyone might take, visiting the same stops at different times, with different partners. This may ultimately be the lesson in the tension between Maroh’s blunt dialogue and her nuanced, expressive bodies: That there is individuality, and individual value, in how we move and speak in the world, even if there is not so much in what it is we do or say.
Julie Maroh’s ‘Body Music’ is a longed-for ode to queerness
Lily Wulfemeyer | November 28, 2017
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'Body Music' by Julie Maroh
Comic artist and graphic novelist Julie Maroh is back on the market with her fourth book, “Body Music.” Translated from French by David Hormel, the collection of 21 vignettes on love and relationships was published this November. Her illustrated narratives are raw, soothing, familiar and organic all at once as they unfold over pages painted in muted brown and gray tones of linseed oil. But the most refreshing aspect of Maroh’s study of love is her focus on historically erased stories. As the author states in the introduction, “Bow-legged, chubby, ethnic, androgynous, trans, pierced, scarred, ill, disabled, old, hairy, outside all the usual aesthetic criteria … queers, dykes, trans, freaks, the non-monogamous, flighty and spiny hearts [...] we are not a minority; we are the alternatives. There are as many love stories as there are imaginations.” Readers who have found themselves inundated by stories of love between people who are straight, white, monogamous and TV-screen beautiful are given a chance to see their own stories play out on the pages of “Body Music.”
"the most refreshing aspect of Maroh’s study of love is her focus on historically erased stories"
The story is knitted together over the course of many months in Montreal, beginning on July 1, a day widely known as Moving Day for the local residents whose leases begin and end. Painted atop this vibrant backdrop is Maroh’s celebration of love and relationships. Maroh reminds us that love isn’t always romance, and sometimes romance doesn’t evolve into love as we wish it would. She depicts the all-too-familiar anxiety of waiting for a break-up text, or reminiscing about years spent with a partner. Some of the stories carry the energy of emergent relationships, and others a state of comfortable stasis as we see into the lives of long-term couples. By reminding us that love is not a standardized experience but a descriptor used to characterize a vast range of human emotion, Maroh redefines what love and relationships are at their core.
While she is mostly successful in tackling a large undertaking, there are still some shortcomings from a craft perspective. Beyond the common theme of love and relationships, there is little consistent structure, leading to vignettes that felt out of place or simply submerged among their counterparts. Furthermore, some of the stories are so touching that, at times, they become almost saccharine, even in the most agonizing moments. This sort of romanticizing equates anxiety and fear with passion, or leads to characters keying the words “I still love you” into their ex-lover’s car. Perhaps we are meant to get lost in the moments of tragic romance or idealized claims about human nature, but at times they are simply difficult to buy into.
Another complaint that Maroh frequently garners from casual readers is in regards to her artistic style. It’s simultaneously shocking and scrupulous, and may admittedly be off-putting to comic fans who could see it as lurid compared to the polished and aggressively colorful pages of a commercial comic book. But Maroh has intentionally skirted idealistic cultural tendencies in which “bodies are luscious, photo-shopped within an inch of their lives” in the portrayal of her characters. Instead, she has characters whose appearances refuse gender stereotyping; lovers lying naked and panting, unselfconscious of their weight; transgender individuals with scars after top surgery; people in wheelchairs on their way to concerts. The art style may not present the streamlined Barbie and Ken doll physiques of the modern comic market, but it is honest and real, just as Maroh intended. “Body Music” asserts there is no need to be embarrassed by one’s body or appearance, and instead chooses to worship what it is capable of and what bursting emotions it contains.
This validating portrayal of what is seen as unconventional makes “Body Music” at once so progressive and also so natural. Readers who may feel underrepresented are given stories that are theirs rather than those of the latest box-office rom com or utopian love triangle. Queer families, partners who are disabled, “nontraditional” families and more are normalized, without any expectation of admiration for meeting a diversity quota. Maroh celebrates those whose love “goes against what is expected of them, sometimes risking their lives in the process” and acknowledges that in a global modern society, the body is increasingly political. These are stories of truth and resistance and representation, radical acts in and of themselves interwoven in a beautiful survey of the different modes of love.
'Body Music' is available for purchase on Amazon, in both paperback and kindle editions.
Skandalon
by Julie Maroh
French graphic novelist Julie Maroh’s first book, Blue is the Warmest Color, was a poignant take on young lesbian love that inspired the Palme d’Or–winning film. Maroh breaks out the full palette in her follow-up, the story of Tazane, a rock star on the edge. Here, each painted panel bursts with colour, from the cool flashbulb light of a press conference to blood-red backgrounds of a raging performance to the ghostly greens of a dope-fuelled underworld. Through these and other hallucinatory images, Maroh depicts her rocker’s increasing sense of isolation and ambivalence.
Yet, while the visuals are affecting, the song itself remains the same. Tazane is a familiar figure: a singer in the Jim Morrison mould, whipping fans into Dionysian ecstasy at every show. His story begins at the height of his fame, leaving his motivation inscrutable, perhaps intentionally so. The crisis hinges on Tazane’s relationship with his audience: do they experience meaning in his lyrics, or are they mere puppets, mindlessly mouthing the words? He gets his answer during a concert in which fans sing along to what appear to be purposely inane lines: “This morning a rabbit shot a hunter! A rabbit with a rifle in his paws!”
In a moment of supreme egotistical hubris, Tazane rapes a young fan backstage after a show. Fans riot, the band breaks up, and Tazane winds up a junky. It’s a turn that leaves little room for a reader to invest in the narrative outcome. Maroh is interested in blurring the lines between pop culture and myth, but the rock ’n’ roll fall from grace is so familiar that for this to work, the material needs to punch harder, or risk coming across as clichéd.
If you enjoy your pop with an undercurrent of French cultural theory and a smattering of classical allusions, you might appreciate what Maroh has concocted here. Otherwise, Skandalon feels like an existential version of the film Almost Famous: all the tragedy, with none of the joy.
Review: Skandalon by Julie Maroh
Posted by comicsgirl on October 21, 2014
How does fame affect creativity and art? That seems to be the central question of Julie Maroh‘s Skandalon (2014, Arsenal Pulp Press). While I know it’s absolutely likely that Maroh started work on this book before Blue is the Warmest Color became an international success, it’s also hard not to see this book as a prescient answer to the pressures of being in the spotlight without really wanting it.
Skandalon focuses on a French rock star who goes by the name of Tazane. He’s talented, gorgeous and moody. He’s also a predator (sexual and otherwise) because he can be. He’s not a particularly likable lead, but he’s one that’s interesting to watch. Readers first meet him when he’s already famous so we don’t see where he came from (although there’s hints about it). Instead, we’re just witnesses to his fall.
While it’s highly allegorical, Maroh does her best to make it feel personal. While it’s hard to feel connected to Tazane himself, her use of color — dark reads, washed out greens, warm pinks, deep blues — to set tone and pace creates a beautiful, sensitive tone. Her panels look like individual paintings and give the story a dreamy quality. For a book about a rock star, there is an astonishing amount of silence in her art. Word balloons often feel like an intrusion as Maroh communicates her story through images alone. Her gift for taking the explicit expressiveness of manga and transforming it into her own style has only gotten stronger. If nothing else, Skandalon is an amazing book visually.
Unfortunately, the story falls short of where it should be. I admire what Maroh was reaching for and while I certainly don’t need to like the main character to enjoy a story, Tazane never quite grasped my empathy. Intellectually, I knew what Maroh was trying say, but I didn’t feel much about anything that happened to anyway toward the end. I missed the visceral, emotional core that Blue is the Warmest Color had. The story was more ambitious but obviously less personal for Maroh, and that shows.
Still, I’d rather see someone reach and fail than not reach at all. I admire that Maroh tried to explore these topics and she’s still a masterful artist. Even if I feel a bit mixed in the end on Skandalon, it still joins the company of books I will continue to think about and revisit. In that way, it’s nothing but a success.