This isn’t a question of “the male gaze,” an idea from feminist film theory and a phrase that has been thrown around a lot by admirers of the movie and that I purposely didn’t use in May. The movie has run-of-the mill representational problems, which is why I quoted the art critic John Berger’s useful axiom from his 1972 book, “Ways of Seeing.” “Men look at women,” Berger wrote. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” It’s a formulation that may not work for all men and all women, as many feminist film theorists have argued. But Berger’s comment retains its relevance, and it’s apt given the art lesson that a man delivers to some women in “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

The lecture takes place during a party given by Adèle and Emma. Adèle has become Emma’s muse, a familiar division of labor that carries into the kitchen, where Adèle cooks the food. Later, with the party in full swing, a man begins talking about art and orgasms. “Ever since women have been shown in paintings, their ecstasy is shown more than men’s, whose is shown via woman,” he says without a hint of irony. “Men try desperately to depict it.” Three women offer short retorts, including that “it could be a fantasy.” Unstoppable, he adds, “Art by women never tackles female pleasure.” The women, including Emma, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts, remain silent. None mention that historically, women were often barred from working with nude models.

The women’s silence is deafening and, like the sex scenes, punctures the movie’s realism. It isn’t that it’s inconceivable that a man, an art type whom Emma thinks could help her career, would yammer on at a party about representations and female orgasms to women who say little. It’s improbable but not unimaginable. The man’s words and the women’s silence are aesthetic choices, and as much a part of the movie’s meaning as the hand-held cinematography; Adèle’s appetite; her work with children; the absence of a score; and her silent, downward look after a man at the same party asks her what sex with Emma is like and then asks Adèle if she wants to be a mother. All these add information and at times serve as metacommentaries on the female body on display in “Blue.”

Watching the movie at Cannes, I couldn’t help thinking of the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s first feature, “Je Tu Il Elle,” which has a lengthy sex scene between two young women. Ms. Akerman, who plays the protagonist, filmed the scene in medium long shot without any of the visual codes (close-ups, fragmented bodies) used in mainstream pornography. It’s infrequent that you see female pleasure like this or even a shot like the one of Brad Pitt’s torso in “Thelma & Louise,” which shows you what Thelma sees before making love. There’s a banality to how a lot of directors represent female bodies and female pleasure, partly because they borrow from the industrial handbook of male-oriented pornography.

In truth, it isn’t sex per se that makes “Blue Is the Warmest Color” problematic; it’s the patriarchal anxieties about sex, female appetite and maternity that leach into its sights and sounds and the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body. In the logic of the movie, Adèle’s body is a mystery that needs solving and, for a brief while, it seems as if Emma will help solve it. In “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir wrote that “the erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and spirit, as the other and as the subject.” This is the ideal, but for Adèle, the erotic experience leads to despair, desperation, isolation. The body betrays her — just like a woman.

That wouldn’t be the first time that happened to a female character, though as it happens, as a movie critic, I spend more time looking at men’s bodies than women’s. Mainstream movies, especially from the big studios, are now overwhelmingly dominated by male-driven stories, made by men, for men. Feminists have taken issues with old Hollywood representations of women, but at least its star system provided a rich body of work, which is one reason you don’t often read feminists talking about movies outside academia and Jezebel.com. There’s not much to discuss. That’s another reason “Blue” is interesting: It’s a three-hour movie about women, a rare object of critical inquiry perhaps especially for American men working in the male-dominated field of movie critics. The truth is we need more women on screen, naked and not, hungry and not, to get this conversation really started.