Garçon stupide

I enjoyed this film. It has a lyrical quality, and it is essentially a character portrait. Many Americans will tire of the film quickly, because they expect clearer character development and a more coherent plot. But if these qualities ate not essential to you and you like French films, you will find this movie touching and memorable. (I know that this is a Swiss, not French, production, but I think most Americans will view it as stylistically French.) The main character and Chatagny's performance, reminded me greatly of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character and performance in "Mysterious Skin." (Many Americans will prefer this movie, though the subject matter is darker.) I love both films, both performances. I hope to see more films with Pierre Chatagny.

I saw this film in New York and was blown away by the acting ability of Pierre Chatagny. For somebody who has never acted before in a professional production, he certainly has a bright future ahead of him. While many films attempt the same docu-drama format that Garcon Stupide features, I have yet to see a film that succeeds at it as well as Garcon Stupide. From the beautiful shots of the Alps to the intense night scenes shot on the streets that Loic works, this film provides a stunning look at a young man arriving at one of the most crucial moments if his life. Loic constantly blurs the line between sex and love and leaves us wanting to know more about his turbulent life, if only to help him discover his true identity.

What is wrong with homo flicks ? This one starts with a good idea and bogs down into utter confusion. The next step is complete oblivion.

A nice actor portrays a young and ignorant man from Gruyère who refuses to commit, refuses to envisage his relationship beyond raw sex cruised on the internet.

He lets a nice girlfriend escape him and tries to reinvent his life. Gradually he reflects on himself and thinks about cultivating his brain and shedding his quite meaningless existence (there does not seem to be much physical pleasure in it !). An interesting theme for a quite boring film.

I don't see what justifies the rave reviews. Apart from the exposition, it came off fairly boring. Yes, Loic is enigmatic and incredibly attractive, and the film could have developed well based on that, but instead it wanders hopelessly after its first 20 minutes and becomes essentially 90% talk and 10% plot. That gets old fast. Even the few unusual "incidents" toward the end -- which I'd guess are there to provide a shock or epiphany -- seem pointlessly surreal.

The director indulges a number of disconnected fetishes for no apparent purpose. What are we supposed to make of the recurring shots of the Alps, or the distressed and always-bandaged eyebrow piercing? If these are supposed to be symbolic of something about Loic, their meanings are far too obscure. If the writers intended to make us guess at these things, that's a tired, pretentious technique that I think ends up being merely annoying, not clever.

Director Lionel Baier has created a work of freshness and imagination and truth. The few melodramatic clichés he employs stand out only for their rarity. In choosing Pierre Chatagny to focus his camera upon, Baier has chosen brilliantly. (Baier who plays an older friend, Lionel, to Chatagny's Loic, is glimpsed just once. In truth the director is a young man of 28 with much great work ahead of him on the evidence of this production).

Though the character and, I would say, Mr. Chatagny at 20, is self-absorbed and vain as 20 year-old boys tend to be, his natural beauty reveals itself in every movement of his eyes and his isolation in the stark awkwardness of his stance. He is not hard to watch or gawk at for 90 minutes.

Loic,a horny Swiss youngster who has notched a lot of casual nocturnal sex, envies his sisterly girlfriend's enjoyable personal relations with her boyfriend, distrusts Lionel's apparent disinterest in immediate sexual gratification and feels hopeless in the presence of an adored soccer player's fatherly love for his three year-old son. Luoc is by turns angry and despairing and anxious.He has begun to suspect it doesn't always boil down to just sex but he doesn't know if he has anything more than sex to give or take and if there is a place in him where there is more he has no idea how to reach it. But after much pain and damage the first unexpected crack of sunlight in the wall of Luoc's frustration comes through beautiful and true. Jim Smith