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.