Pieces of Me (2013)

the audience applauded

Must See Movie...

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

What excites me the most - as a dedicated fan of french cinematography - are occasional findings of hidden treasures like these. I ran onto this gem previously mesmerized by Exarchopoulos' lifelike performance in ''Blue is the warmest color'' and after watching it was left everything but disappointed. ''Pieces of Me'' is a wonderful Rousseauesque tale (in the sense that it captivates beautiful scenery of simple but almost-extinct rural life in France) and above all a dramatic opera led by a troubled teenager named Erell (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The intimate feeling of her experience is perpetuated throughout the movie by her filming day-to-day life with a hand-held camera (thus awarding the viewer with a glimpse of her own POV).The complexities of broken family relations are omnipresent here and disclose themselves in a natural order as the movie unravels. Erell lives with her sick mum (to whom she serves, by her own words, as a maid) and seemingly oblivious father. The family ''harmony'' is disrupted one day as her sister Sarah suddenly arrives at the doorsteps - after a 4 year long mute absence. Sarah, accompanied by her fiancé, is 6 months pregnant and beginning her own life. This impetuous arrival, as it will show, served as a catalyst for the catharsis of all members of the family.In the meantime, Erell is escaping the ugly reality she has been involuntarily ''thrown'' into by hanging out with her male group of friends (drinking, acting foolish, discovering her own sexuality). On the contrary, her fathers form of escapism is his interest for entomology/bugs (he stuffs insects?). Herein lies the only minus and inconsistency of the whole movie - redundant insisting on the trivialities of her friends' individual fates, as if we're not already engaged by Erell's own state of affairs. However, this fault is almost made inconspicuous by the aforementioned insight in conjugated-with-nature way of life this little community practices.The touch of civilization (Paris, that is) as we know it is brought with Sarah and her fiancé. But with a price - becoming a ''survivor'' made her sister the only victim. She is faced with numerous questions and haunted by responsibilities she once fled away from (such as taking care of her ill mother). Erell eventually takes a leap just like she did, taking charge and moving on to a possibly better life.

I recently saw this French movie on TV Monde USA. Most French-language movies on that channel have English subtitles, but this one had FRENCH subtitles (apparently for the benefit of all the hearing-impaired Francophones who live in the US, but can't read English). Needless to say, I didn't follow the plot too well, but since no one else has reviewed this yet. . .This movie is about a precocious, provincial French teenager(Adele Exarchopolous)who likes to document everyone around her with a video camera. This includes her family--a chronically ill mother, a moody father, and a pregnant older sister who arrives from Paris with her new beau (or husband?). The protagonist is also kind of a tomboy with almost exclusively male friends (none of whom really seems to notice that she's smoking hot), so she also documents their troubled lives. One is a pretty boy with and unusually close relationship with his mother and violent relationship with his (step?)father. One seems to like to abuse animals. And the third is a weird Scottish kid who wears a kilt and occasionally speaks in English. He also does weird things like lie down in the middle of a road (but he's also the only one to do the completely understandable thing and have off-screen sex with our nubile documentarian).This is strangely sex-free for a French movie, especially given the actress who plays the mother, Zabou Breitman, is most famous for playing Tawny Kitaen's sidekick in the softcore porn/nudie fantasy "The Perils of Gwendoline". That was 20 years ago though and even in French I can tell she's become a vastly better actress in the years since. Then there's the lead, an 18-year-old Adele Exarchopolous, who would go on a year later to do "Blue is the Warmest Color". But I think too much has been made of the graphic sex scenes in that movie and too little has been made about what an incredibly natural actress Adele E. is. She has a very expressive face and is one of the most talented non-verbal actresses I've ever seen (which is useful here since I didn't understand a lot of what she said verbally). She's incredibly photogenic and frankly she's more appealing with her clothes on than most women are with them off.The title of this seems to come not only from here on-going, and rather elliptical, "documentary", but also a couple memorable montages of this young French beauty lying in the bathtub with the camera lingering on various "pieces of her". They're actually not the pieces most males really want to see most (for that you should watch "Blue"), but they're more unusual pieces (knees, wrists, shoulders), and really EVERYTHING about this particular girl is beautiful. To some extent, this is also true of this movie, which is slow and elliptical, but also beautiful and rewarding (even with no English subs).