The French Kissers (2009)

How sad is this?

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

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.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Les Beaux Gosses literally means The Good Looking Kids. In this movie nothing could be further from the truth. Not that it matters though. You will see pimply kids, kids with a mullet, obese kids and nerdy kids. I just thought that was a smart thing to do. It looks more real than any other American teenager movie played by young beautiful adults passing for sixteen year old adolescents. In Les Beaux Gosses you get the typical view of adolescents discovering the other gender. Most of the time frustrated by their excessive testosterone, they try to have their first sexual experience, or try to get it on with their secret crush. Normally it's not the kind of movies I would go for but I have to admit it was funny to watch. Not all the time but it has it's moments.

The French title of this coming-of-age comedy is Les beaux gosses, "The Good-Looking Boys," and that's the first joke: these boys aren't all that good-looking. But first-time director (and comic book artist) Sattouf and his co-writer Marc Syrigas take the warm-hearted stand that adolescence is a goofy time for pretty much everybody. Hervé (Vincent Lacoste) is tall and scrawny and his Arab sidekick Camel (Anthony Sonigo) is short and has ridiculous long-in-back Seventies hair that signals his rock-star aspirations. The hair styles are iffy, the physiques are far from ideal, the clothes are mismatched, and they have acne. And the pimples aren't just painted on. But it doesn't matter. Hervé and Camel do okay, and the actors who play them are quite appealing.Hervé goes up to Aurore (Alice Trémolière), one of the prettiest girls in his school, and asks her for a date, and she laughs. Aurore usually has a little entourage of blond, well-groomed boys around her. Before long however she sneaks off with Hervé and they kiss. Hervé may not be a relationship Aurore wants to acknowledge, but he's fine to practice on. And they go further.American viewers may take Les beaux gosses for a knock-off of a Hollywood youth pic, and it has nothing radically new to offer in its plot line of a kid who scores and then gets his heart broken. The American market is saturated with this kind of stuff. But for francophone viewers, there are nuances in the story-line and the dialogue that get lost in translation. Imagine Heathers done into French. Like Heathers, French Kissers adopts and teases teenage slang. Hervé absorbs French rap lingo, which pops out with hilarious inappropriateness. He thinks rap is good seduction music, and at one point, trying to be casual, he addresses his school's black program supervisor as "nigga." In fact the humor is not so much in what the boys are doing as in the way they talk about it.Overall Les beaux gosses is more a mockery than a knockoff of Hollywood testosterone, and feels somewhat remote from the excesses of Judd Apatow-sponsored features, though it has something in common with "Freaks and Geeks" -- but with more, much more x-rated stuff. The antics of Hervé, Camel, and their pals are blithely vulgar. There is so much gross-out and crude stuff here it ceases to gross out or seem crude. The specifics of masturbation (and the overuse of socks) and other aspects of teeanage sex are never avoided, and the American Pie/Superbad-style dirty talking and acting is as vivid as it is fresh.Les beaux gosses also goes into lots of detail about who people are and what they do; the movie's great virtue is its specificity, despite its focus on generic (and amorphous) "ado" problems. A gay lit teacher isn't just suspected of being gay; he's in a magazine as a gay role model and a student asks him to autograph a copy. Emmanuelle Devos has an unusual turn as a haughty school administrator. Hervé's very French single mom (played by director Noemie Lvovsky) takes a humorous interest in his jack-off activities, and also follows him to his girlfriend's party. She's a millstone, but always a benign one.There is, of course, at least one threateningly perfect boy, Loïc (Baptiste Huet), but he turns out to be far from perfect when a weird accident happens at a gym class whose tumbling sessions also give Hervé a bloody nose. Hervé, Aurore, Camel, and friends Benjamin (Robin Nizan-Duverger) and various others are messy, confused, hormone-crazed, and even sexually vague. Hervé's relationship with his mother is borderline incestuous and with Camel, as they act out and try out, has its homoerotic phases.It's this cornucopia of absurd over-the-top-ness and richness of detail that explains Les beaux gosses' successful inclusion in Director's Fortnight at Cannes and its rave views after its summer 2009 French release. It was shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2010.

Teenagers saga, topic visited many time by film makers, for me this one is fresh funny and sincere. I won't draw comparison with others as I feel it stands OK on its own. I left France 40 years ago and my teenage day was quite different on the ethnicity mix and the freedom of sexual expression that exists today. Yet I could associate so well with my own teenagers' experiences. Although the movie does deal a lot with sexual issues; and why not if it's about teenagers growing up. The film also deals with other relevant issues. I'm a little taking aback by the tittle chosen for English language "French Kissers". In my view it reduces the expectation of the potential viewer to something a little more trivial than what this movie is about. I even read a comment that explained why it was so named! My learning and understanding of the expression "french kiss" is somehow fairly specific and I could not relate to it appropriately further than a play on word. I wish I had the skill to translate meaningfully what "Les Beaux Gosses" conveys. I'm not happy with "the beaut kids" or " the great kids" but it's around this idea. And the idea in "beau gosse" is someone who think he or she's ready to put one over you but smoothly with a smile, weather or not it will happen. If I had to put a title in English for it I probably would have called it LOL, yes because this film is not threatening anyone and does touch people in a way they most likely will relate with it on way or the other, but whatever you will laugh out loudly. If you don't I don't envy you!

I was, initially, unsure of just what to say about this delightful French film but after reading the viewer comments I decided that my opinions are as valuable as some of the film cognoscenti who have offered less than enlightening thoughts about The French Kissers. No, I do not believe the film is trite; I do not believe the film has covered ground visited more thoughtfully by other films and I do not believe that it is over stated. Of course coming of age films must, of necessity, deal with similar topics as do other films in this same genre but I do not believe that this film can be disparaged for doing so. The elements of the film are recognizable by any person old enough to have already passed through this awkward adolescent period in our personal history, degree obviously will vary and to see a French take on this passage is hugely interesting. The situations exposed throughout this not so gentle film are familiar to all of us and therefore open to our individual memories of our own passage and this is the beauty of The French Kissers, it allows the viewer to look inside lives of people going through the same adolescent trauma but seeing it in a very, at least for me, different society. As rough as this film was, it still presented situations for which we all could relate. I found it a wonderful knowing film that should be seen.