14/19
After years apart, the estranged lovers discover that every path they take leads them back together
Local rebellious teenager Clotaire falls in love with his schoolmate Jackie – but gang violence leads him down a darker, more destructive path. Malik Frikah, who plays 17-year-old Clotaire in this film, was a world champion breakdancer when he was 10. One of the characters wears a Rolex Daytona Ceramic in the 1990s, but the watch was only released in 2016.
Mes MainsMusic by Gilbert BécaudLyrics by Pierre Delanoë
The first part, with the kids, is pretty good. The film should have ended there for the audience’s sake. And Gilles Lellouche would have directed one of the best French teen romances of the decade.
The rest of the film, the second act, is terrible
Actors François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos lack chemistry together, their performances in this film being bland and uncompromising. I suppose both actors should start to question their own careers in French cinema after two newcomers Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah outdo them and steal the lead role in this confusingly mediocre film Cristo.. I mean the old story of injustice to a young rebel who returns for revenge and the search for his beloved.
A stylized and tacky male gaze
However, it turns out with an exaggerated and caricatured toxic masculinity. And halfway through and at the end of the second act the plot ends with a loss of credibility, beyond the burden of everything, is the strange determination that the film shows in seeking originality in every frame it offers, without achieving it even once. Every time it decides, it always opts for the most formal, the most obvious.
Which we have already seen
And so, it repeats itself, three hours of what is closest to a French blockbuster, with good marketing and PR behind it, is what French audiences will see this year.