Beijing intensively lobbied commission members to avoid the public embarrassment of debate and censure.
Had Kechiche limited himself to quick scenes featuring the long-familiar pneumatic conventions of writhing and sighing, there would be little embarrassment and little debate.
As Henry Waxman says, "these efforts to stifle debate are an embarrassment," but are they legal?
"The coalition are urgently seeking to avoid any embarrassment by not allowing MPs to debate the amendment from Nigel Mills which would delay the doors opening to Romania and Bulgaria until 2018.
The April 17 Senate debate was a public embarrassment in which a minority employed insults to logic to thwart the will of a vast majority of the nation.
Republicans took a beating in the debate, and it was an embarrassment they are eager not to repeat.
As he told the Washington Post's Dan Balz and Philip Rucker, the Republican debates, in particular, were "an embarrassment and ridiculous".
But the list of declared candidates is so pitifully short that last week the debate was postponed until September, to avoid the embarrassment of a stage potentially populated only by Tim Pawlenty and the pizza magnate Herman Cain.
Serena Williams's 6-0, 6-1 route of Errani in singles Thursday caused considerable commotion on Twitter: many called it an embarrassment for women's tennis and for the equal prize money debate to be reopened.
And then he meekly ended this string of embarrassments by announcing that he would, after all, attend the first debate.
