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Pure and open film about teenagers in Belgium and their life

Parents, beware. If you have teenage children, don't go see this film, otherwise you will never look at them the same way you did before. Or should I say: please go see this film, in order to better understand why your children do what they do.

Flemish director Fien Troch shows what they do, without any restriction. They hang around, smoke weed, ride their skateboards, flirt with each other, occasionally have sex, play video games, and endlessly check the screens of their smartphones. Their teachers and parents try to communicate with them, but to no avail. They say the wrong things, are unable to pick up signals, and send out the wrong messages. But the inability to communicate is mutual: the teenagers don't understand their parents, and don't even try to. They just don't seem to bother.

One of the best scenes shows how one of the teenagers is given a television set for his bedroom. His uncle has trouble installing the set, but the teenage kid is completely unhelpful and even uninterested. After a long while and some comical efforts, the screen finally lights up. 'Now you can watch whatever you like', his aunt says brightly. After the adults leave the room, the kid turns off the screen and continues checking his smartphone. Kids don't watch television anymore, but not all adults are aware of that.

Troch doesn't take sides. The parents make mistakes, and one of them is absolutely deranged, but the kids' behaviour is sometimes shockingly repulsive as well. The mutual miscommunication leads to a dramatic event, the consequences of which dominate the second half of the film.

Everything is filmed in a no-nonsense straightforward documentary style. No cinematographic sophistication here, it's all filmed as it happens in real life. Some scenes are even filmed by the kids themselves, with their smartphones of course. Troch has chosen for a boxed screen in a 4:3 aspect ratio, maybe to accentuate the authenticity of it all. The same goes for the sound, which is so authentic that the dialogue is mostly unintelligible. Subtitles are needed to know what is being said.

This is a film in the tradition of Larry Clark's 'Kids', but it has also similarities to Lynne Ramsay's 'We need to talk about Kevin', which also focuses on the communication gap between parents and children. Because of its raw, unpolished style of filming, the emotional impact of this film is very intense. As I said: parents, beware.

Besides the strong and hard story I recognized the way the teenagers in this movie spent their time and interacted with each other living in their own world. The same with how the parents and teachers try their best and give them advice with all the best intentions. But this advice doesn't match with the world of the youngsters because of the lack of communication. People that can't talk and people that can't listen.

The career of Belgian film director Fien Troch has focused on the dynamics of family, youth and childhood. She has evidenced her interest, since her first short, "Wooww" (1999), a grotesque satire on violence in the domestic and social settings, and how it affects children. That exchange between the child that observes (from an early age to 18 years) and the environment that forks and deteriorates, is a constant in the three films by Troch that I have seen. Her debut feature «Someone Else's Happiness» (2005) is a choral film about one's own and others' pain, set in several homes, around the death of a child run over by a driver who fled; «Kid» (2012) is the story of a country boy who witnesses the deterioration of the farm where he is growing up, when his father disappears and his mother tries to cope with the situation, while her husband is sought by fearsome creditors; and «Home» (2016), with middle-class and working-class main characters, shows a sector of today's youth, made up of children from dysfunctional homes, who reject education, get high, have sex, love their skateboard and rock, and are extensions of their cell phones. The moral fiber is almost non-existent: they are kids who seek to survive, in places where no one has any idea of the crisis they are going through. The film, according to the credits, is based on real events and recounts the case of a boy named Kevin, just out of jail, who tries to regenerate himself as a plumber's apprentice; of John, a boy victim of his incestuous mother; Sammy, the most affluent of the three and the most fragile when he faces situations that his closed home excludes, and finally Lina, disoriented, going from one bed to the other. Fien Troch (who won the Lion of Venice for Best Direction of this film) aptly recurs to melodrama, to adds scenes and moments that gradually increase the tension towards the inevitable tragic event. The end is ambiguous: although it insinuates a possible adjustment of the protagonists' accounts with their inner demons, there is nothing to indicate that they have learned to do so... And beating those demons is not easy, it costs us a lifetime. Another good Fien Troch film, highly recommended.