Garcon Stupide [2004] [DVD]

If you love French cinema then you will love this film. Garcon Stupide rejects the sweet enhancements endemic to Hollywood, and rather explores the cold, raw brutality of youth struggling to find both purpose and identity. People can indeed be stupid at times, and monumentally so. This film seeks to portray that as it really is.

The main characters are brutally honest in their interactions with each other. One is not quite sure whether there is more hate than love between them, as they seem more determined to hurt each other with their honesty which rips apart any veneer that seeks to hide the truth. Yet they have a undeniable connection which is both sincere and real in its affection, and whilst their honesty is brutal at times its motivation is not.

The impact of one characters suicide ripples throughout the film, exposing the main character to a sea of emotions which he seems incapable of understanding. His decent into a dark world of casual intimacies and self-destruction is made self-evident, as he is forced to address his demons and realise that the innocence of youth must make way for the experience that comes with being responsible.

This is a movie that manages to combine art house with sexy, following the self discovery of a young man about what it means to really be alive. It also has a certain enigma about it... probably becasue you are trying to figure out if the main character is as the title suggests, a bit dim, or a (typical) male who thinks and sees the world in black and white, but them discovers there are shades of grey. Worth a look.

Spoiler alert - this review contains spoilers.

The limited reviews should have warned me - this is a strange film about Loic (the handsome Pierre Chatagny) aged 18, who works at a crushingly dull factory job (don't ask!), spending his spare time in two ways. Either he's meeting older men in dates made online for gay sex; possibly for money, though this isn't made clear, but he sports a fetching new sweater at one stage which looks bought on the proceeds. Alternatively, he's mooching around at the flat of friend Marie with whom he has an asexual frank relationship (he tells her of his encounters, characterised by his determination for them to be brisk - he doesn't understand affection or tenderness). Why she stands him is a puzzle - he also visits at her museum workplace, moping beside her as she tries to work.

Loic is dim, it has to be said, but he has a book Pleasure with Words and uses a dictionary to find out what words mean that he has not previously met. However, he doesn't quite grasp the meanings correctly. At one stage, he describes his photography as impressionist; the one thing photography can hardly ever be.

We see Loic meet one date Lionel who apparently is not interested in sexual activity but instead talks; though later Loic is disappointed when Lionel tries to drag him into a toilet cubicle, revealing himself to be no more than any other punter. We see Marie meeting a bespectacled young man and having a life outside of her morose pal. Loic uses his mobile phone as a camera. Encouraged to look about him more, he becomes a bit of a voyeur.

This is where the film becomes complex - is it a dream sequence where he holds a knife next to the sleeping couple, Marie and her friend? The knife certainly looms big on screen. I felt certain it would figure again in a kind of gay jealousy Psycho.

He also develops an obsession with a lower league footballer Rui Alves played it seems by Rui Pedro Alves. Luic stalks him. Again a sequence follows which may or may not be a dream sequence.

(Spoiler alert) Luic finds Marie prone on the floor - is she dead, is it a murder or a suicide? Luic lies alongside her, but makes no move to touch her; then he jumps in Marie's car, in which she had been giving him driving lessons, and makes for the hills. Is he fleeing a murder, and if so did he commit it or will he be pulled in for it either way? Up in the mountains above the snow line he encounters Rui Alves and his son (also R P Alves' son in real life), surely by Luic having worked out where Rui would be. They play together in the snow, but both Rui and his son get snow blindness. Rui seems curiously resigned to his temporary affliction and at peace with Luic bringing him tea; the dreaminess of this imminent instant family leads me to think it a dream sequence too. But the film jumps on, and that's the last we see of Rui. Next thing we see is Luic's car overturned in a field, then he's in hospital, then being collected by a grumpy adult, whom I suspect is his step-father. After a meal with parents, Luic sets off into the city laden with a proper camera (Rui had told him real photographers don't rely on mobile phone cameras!) and finds his way to a gaudy fairground. One stall is called L'Enfer (Hell) and over its door has Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. Luic rides a big wheel and, almost alone on it, sees in another car a hooded character looking almost like Death, though without the scythe. A coup d'etonerre follows as the hoodie lowers his hood to reveal a blonde young man who exchanges happy glancing smiles with Luic. Fade into credits.

What to make of this? The brief sex scenes, often employing split screen which distances the details, are hasty, lacking in love, reflecting Luic's miserable (unspelled-out) past. We sense Luic has never been loved and didn't know what love was, even when Lionel tries to explain. In this sense this is a clever film, about how a damaged youth seeks himself. In a lengthy speech towards the end, as Luic heads for the city, he declaims to himself that he will discard possessions etc. I almost expected him to say, Isherwood-like, that he would be a camera. But lacking any photographic skill, what he stumbles upon is ... love. Possibly - we never know for sure.