TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
Kechiche dropped another classic, brehs.
It's another nearly 3 hour coming-of-age drama about young aspiring Tunesian screenwriter Amin returning to his hometown after four years in Paris in 1994, the beach town a hotbed for young tourists coming to party.
The center of his attention is Ophélie, childhood friend and now certified pawg who he catches cheating on her fiancee (off fighting in the Gulf war) with his cousin Tony. Her unapologetic stance about the not so secret affair is troublesome to say the least, but at the same time Tony is hardly faithful to her either, breaking the heart of every young tourist he can trap with his charm.
Meanwhile Amin gets dragged along by his cousin and family and although his good looks have a lot of girls falling for him too, he is searching for a deeper connection, which proves very difficult in a town where superficial love reigns supreme and beneath the seemingly careless attitude of his peers hide a mountain of growing jealousy, rivalry and manipulation.
After Kechiche got criticized for sexualising the lesbian relationship in La Vie d'Adele, you know the PC police wouldn't just let him breathe and as such Mektoub got a lot of criticism for its supposed "male gaze". And yes, Kechiche's voyeuristic filming style does favor the female body a lot, sometimes understandably so (it's after all a movie about horny young people) and sometimes walking the line of how necessary it is (such as Ophélie's ass cheeks hanging out of her ripped hotpants a lot, although you won't hear me complain about that).
Still, like La Vie d'Adele the close intimate look and length is perfect to reveal the deeper layers that lie underneath the exterior of the careless, vapid summer holiday that so many people would normally treat as just that.