Poison Friends (2006)

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Delicate film about illusions and truth. About trust and self-introspection, about fiction, desires and social masks. About literature as spider web and structure of an age.Nostalgic pledge for discover of reality's nuances, search of intellectual traps, definition of master and errors, appearances and compassion. The other like perfect prey of our mediocrity. Questions without answers and forms of refuge.It is not a spectacular movie and the ethic circle is one of signs for French vision about social realities but the message, the acting, the lights and the shadows, atmosphere and the subtle end, ambiguous beginning and images of idol-victim, measure of gestures and skin of dialogs, tension and waiting, the carpet of lies and the fight between ambition and its instruments, obsessions and some words of books, self-legitimation and split dreams, taste of Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" makes a special occasion to look an ordinary world in a new light:small sins and vanities ashes.

Fascinating French film on a group of university students and their self-appointed leader, Mourney, who is a big fish in a small intellectual pond. He considers himself a supreme authority on writing - people only write, he says, because they are too weak not to. What begins as a strong, amiable friendship is rooted in Mourney's pompousness, jealousy, and competitive edge, which makes him lie and manipulate his friends to seemingly greater success than theirs. His lies, temper, and falseness leads to his demise, as each of his friends realizes his true nature, and escapes to independence and personal success. Very dark, shadowy, and cold feel to this movie. This was a great film, taking a close look at a character many people have known who is truly poisonous.

I saw this movie yesterday and all I can say is that it is really intelligent, well performed, and the filming is also surprising because of a "Brechtian" way of reminding you that what you are seeing is a movie,not the reality...as if, the director wanted to tell you that he wouldn't deceive you. This picture is not only brilliantly written, with strong dialogs, and an intelligent story, it also has a Hitchcockien touch. But, be warned that it is not a film done in a way that one is used to. Finally, it moved me a lot from the beginning to its end. One of the best and original french movie of this year. Definitely a brilliant and authentic artistic work.

If I'm right that Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer) is still pivotal in French culture, the slightly disreputable bad-boy mentor remains an essential part of the myth of youth over there. And you'll enjoy Emmanuel Bourdieu's fast-paced, light, but biting study of a role model who crashed, so long as you accept the film's very French, Parisian, focus on getting ahead early in a small, competitive, celebrity-conscious, idea-smitten intellectual world. That's the world the good-looking Alexandre Pariente (Alexandre Steiger) enters when he walks into the Sorbonne literature class of famous writer-scholar Professor Mortier (Jacques Bonnaffé), straight off the train and carrying his suitcase. Alexandre and new arrivals Eloi Duhaut (Malik Zidi) and Edouard Franchon (Thomas Blanchard) are instantly impressed by André Mourney (Thibault Vinçon), who has the audacity to address this first class, speaking with enormous confidence (and some elegance) about the subject of writing.Alexandre, Eloi, and Edouard become André Mourney's disciples. His theme is always that people only write because they are too weak to resist, and that they must have a good excuse for giving way to that weakness. André is really a terrible boor and ultimately disreputable: but he has more panache than the others, as that opening class showed. He turns out to be destructive, and a liar. A terrible liar. He steals the girl they all want, the librarian Marguerite (Natacha Régnier of Ozon's Criminel Lovers/Les amants criminels and Fontaine's How I Killed My Father/Comment j'ai tué mon père), telling Eloi to burn his love-note to her (because, of course, one should never write love-notes) and then moving in on her himself. He has a good effect on Alexandre, telling him he should really be an actor. That turns out to be true, and Alexandre has immediate success in the French classics. But André's pompous negativism leads Eloi to go out in the middle of the night and dump a novel he's written in the trash. Eloi's mother is a well-known, slightly crazy writer, Florence Duhaut (Dominique Blanc), so Eloi's understandably diffident. But André's influence on him is destructive.It turns out that André is a protégé of Professor Mortier. But André's so busy pontificating among his peers, he neglects to work on his thesis. He tells Eloi to work on James Ellroy, and suggests there's a scholarship at Berkeley waiting for them both. When things go bad between Mortier and André, the latter leaves, pretending that he is going to an American university. This is the crucial moment when the others, who've been held together one way or another by André (even those among them André has been most abusive to), finally have to grow up and become independent. We already know by now what a rotter André has been. We've seen him open the beautiful Marguerite's laptop and delete a short story she has written. (Eloi finally replaces André in Marguerite's good graces by retrieving it).Eloi is faced with a problem when he learns his mother has also retrieved his discarded novel, submitted it to her publisher faking his signature, and had it accepted. Eventually he allows it to be published, and it's a great success. He doesn't like his original title though. The new one is: Les Amitiés maléfiques (Poison Friends).The young actors are all appealing. Malik Zidi will be remembered from Les Temps qui changent, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, and Place Vendome-- and will soon be seen in none other than Le Grand Meaulnes (a new version). The least known till now is Thibault Vinçon (André), whom the director spotted and admired for his "technical brilliance and sensitivity" at an acting workshop. Vinçon reappears at the end, and the way he conveys André's rapid transformation from rising star to instantly old raté (failure) is brilliant.Bourdieu knows whereof he speaks: he is himself the son of a well known French intellectual and film figure. This is a smart and thought-provoking film whose classic theme doesn't prevent if from being fresh. A sterling choice by the festival jury of the Film Society of Lincoln Center for the 2006 New York Film Festival.