Eager Bodies (2003)

Too much of everything

Fresh and Exciting

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a movie about a very attractive young couple who enjoy a very active sex life. The woman discovers she has a fatal disease (cancer, I think?). The boyfriend reacts by having sex with other beautiful women. So the girlfriend decides to romantically push him toward her incredibly attractive cousin. This movie has the problem of a lot of modern French movies in my opinion. It tries to achieve an emotional depth, but this is compromised by the need to ALSO cast the most unbelievably good-looking--and not necessarily most experienced--actors they can possibly find for the three leads. It certainly achieves a high level of SEXINESS, but this is often at odds with the emotional depth the narrative is trying to attain. Parts of the movie--like the final scene--are quite powerful, but others are more trite.Laura Smet plays the dying woman. She looks like a slightly less voluptuous version of Isild LeBesco. She spends a lot of the movie in the nude, and frankly she makes dying young of cancer look a whole lot more sexy than it probably is, even after she loses her hair. But even before she gets sick, the alleged love between her and her boyfriend is really only established by the hot sex they have. Nicolas Devouchelle plays the boyfriend. He looks like a tattooed male model here and his performance in particular sometimes approaches the level of Carolina Herrera perfume commercial. To be fair, some of the problem is his rather unsympathetic character, which I believe is meant to give this movie a darker feel, kind of like "Breaking the Waves". But his character comes off much more shallow than dark, and it just doesn't seem very believable that he is cheating on his dying girlfriend in one scene and sobbing uncontrollably the next (Marlon Brando pulled this off in "Last Tango in Paris", but this actor is obviously no Marlon Brando).Probably the actor with the longest subsequent career here is Marie Denarnaud who plays the cousin, but she was pretty inexperienced at this point in her career. She looks like Adele Exarchopolous (or Adele Exarchopolous looks like her)and frankly I think a lot of men would probably MURDER their girlfriend or wife (and probably several other people) if it would get them in bed with her. And the sheer sexiness of her scenes is often pretty suspect, like a scene where she and her dying cousin take a bath together. This is the second French movie I've seen with adult females taking a bath with each other (Sophie Marceau and her adolescent daughter also share a--much more PG rated--bath in the French teen film "LOL"). Maybe this is normal in France, but it isn't anywhere else. And then there's the incestual three-way. . .Let me put it this way. They say that it is physiologically impossible for most men to cry while they have an erection. I don't know if that is true, but I wouldn't expect too many men to shed tears during this movie. The problem is I doubt too many women will either.

Girlfriend Charlotte (Laura Smet) and boyfriend Paul (Nicolas Duvauchelle) are in love; girlfriend gets sick, very sick. Female cousin Ninon (Marie Denarnaud) enters the picture by chance, offers support, and gradually becomes a complication. The French have done some of the harshest, most honest film depictions of serious illness, Patrice Chéreau's (also 2003) 'Mon frère' being the most striking recent example, though those who've cited Cyril Collard's self-starred 1992 autobiographical film (extraordinary achievement) about the wild life ('Les Nuits fauves') of a gay man with AIDS are right to do so: thinking of it reminds one how intensely, defiantly alive the dying can be, especially when they're young.It's natural not to want to watch this, to make up excuses like that it's trying too hard to be important, that it's just too unfun. But if you stick with it you get a very honest, fresh, almost elegant treatment of its themes. What makes it work is that the three young actors, who are beautiful to look at (and that matters too) are excellent and give their all, without excess, but without holding back anything.Do jealousy and libido survive not only life-threatening illness, but chemotherapy? The film asks us to believe that in someone as young and intense, as much in love and as willful and angry as Charlotte they do. Smet, daughter of Johnny Halliday and actress Nathalie Baye, is beyond good here. Duvauchelle, who, like Smet, has natural ease in front of the camera, a strong screen presence, and the restraint to use it naturally, is well cast because he has both stoicism and an edge of spoiled adolescence -- or is it simply sensuality -- the contradictory combination of the athlete.The ménage-à-trois concept is dipped in an acid bath here. Under the threat of death and despair--and with the ambivalence of Charlotte, who offers Ninon to Paul as a palliative, out of kindness, and then hates herself and them for the result--the usual triangle is more dangerous and more complex than usual. The whole concept of fidelity is searingly reexamined, and the ménage is transformed, and reaches a resolution that's as peaceful as it is simple. The filmmakers, writers, director and actors share a willingness to go for broke with the taste to let events express themselves which, despite the simple, hand-held DV style, results in a style that's truly cinematic. A surprising success, within its parameters of first film and youthful acting. "Freely adapted" from the novel by Christian de Montella. Director Giannoli showed his skill earlier by winning the Golden Palm at Cannes for his 25-minute short, 'The Interview' (1998), starring Matthieu Amalric.

Although I did not consider "les corps impatients" as a masterpiece, I think the director did an interesting job in filming bodies (ailing bodies, healthy bodies, tattooed bodies, desired bodies, rejected bodies...). Charlotte's pain - physical of course, but also and mainly her psychological discomfort when she understands that she might die and that the world will not stop revolving for all that, that her loved one will love somebody else and therefore will forget a little bit about her - is palpable and well expressed. Laura Smet (who by the way is no famous pop star in France... where did you get that???), here in her first movie, proves to be a promising actress (like her mum?).

Just the kind of film that gives French cinema a bad rep: incredibly boring, dull, overblown trash about coming-of-age uneasiness, sex without love and so on. Hasn't all this been forever buried with the worst of 70s cinema ? Lord, we even have teen angst pangs and struggling with illness subplots, and all filmed with leaden camera-work by a director with as much lightness of touch as an anvil. Keep the guy away from a camera, for God's sake! The film's only selling point seemingly was the nude appearance of a French pop singer as the 'star' of this dud. Good grief! Better read the tabloids if you're into that sort of thing. What a waste of celluloid!!