Notre paradis

This is not an easy movie to watch, because of the extremely cynical and negative story. An aging (30 something) hustler hooks up with a mysterious angelic newbie, they develop a love-affair but also continue having payed sex with older men, in the process robbing and even murdering them. Gaël Morel (director and writer) hardly provides any backgrounds, so it's hard to understand their drives and motives (if any). Vassili seems mainly to act on uncontrollable impulses and Angelo, after some initial hesitating, just goes along with it. Sure, we see tenderness between the two, and they also have a warm relation with Vassili's best friend Anna and her little son, but for the rest we get to see two opportunistic, relentless and very unsympathetic persons, which makes it very hard to relate to them.

When in the end justice at last is served, this feels right, but the movie ends so abruptly right there and then, that you are still left unsatisfied: what will happen to them? Is there any remorse? Somehow I missed in this movie urgency, it didn't seem to go anywhere at all, in fact in the end we are left with the same questions as at the start, like: who are these two, why do they do these horrible things?!?

Vassili is played by Stephane Rideau. I saw him recently in "Wild Reeds" ("Les Roseau sauvages") by director Téchiné (in that movie a young Gaël Morel by the way played the leading role), Rideau was only 18 years old back then, and stunningly handsome like a young Alain Delon. But now, at age 35, he looked old, puffy and worn-out. It totally fitted his character, as well as this movie's premise of old versus young, but still I was a bit taken aback by this change. On the other hand: kudos for his courage to not hide anything, but on the contrary, making it instrumental to the movie! Young Dimitri Durdaine is not just cute, but holds himself pretty well and is convincing enough as the somewhat intangible and mysterious love-object. There's a fair amount of sex and nudity, not unusual in Morel's films, and fitting the subject.

Wow, Our Paradise! This movie blew me away from the first frame. One of the best gay movies I've ever seen, its strengths include its indisputable realism. The trolls, the johns, the older men are cast and played to perfection. You forget you're seeing actors who may or may not be gay. As a gay man you might be afraid you are seeing embarrassing bits and pieces of your own life exposed on that screen.

Prepare to be shocked. I've never seen such negative gay themes presented so convincingly. Sort of like a gay version of Natural Born Killers on steroids. Death, dismemberment and destruction as entertainment. Yet you can't take your eyes off the handsome but immoral and psychopathic main characters, the street-trash couple (Stephane Rideau as Vassili, and Dimitri Durdaine as Angelo) who wreak havoc on anyone in their destructive path. Their love is so real, so palpable, that you yearn to see them survive the bloody nightmare, le merde, that is their lives.

I only wish I spoke French, the language of this movie. There are English-language subtitles, but however good the captions are, there is just no way to capture every nuance spoken in such a sophisticated language as French. It's the language that gave us such elegant terms as soixante-neuf, menage-a-trois, frottage, mon choi, voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?, and so many more.

Our Paradise is magnificently filmed on location in Paris and elsewhere across France. You feel as if you were standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I normally don't watch films in a foreign language, but the title fooled me into thinking it was in English (original title: Notre Paradis). One glimpse of the mesmerizing story and I was hooked regardless of language. Available on Netflix.

It's such a great love story it brings together the pain of how homosexuals have to live but yet you can't feel sorry for they intentionally Go out of their way to hurt people just to survive but they take it to a little bit of an extreme it kind of shows you how during the whole movie it's almost as if you don't feel bad for what they're doing because they make you think it's what they have to do to survive but if we were to see this from a different point of view we would see that what they're doing is wrong and in a criminal act the fact that they're in love kind of makes you feel like what they're doing isn't so bad because they're doing it for love but that is wrong they are killing ceiling just to find happiness little did they know they could find happiness trust within each other and they have but they took what they had for granted and wanted more this is definitely a highly recommended movie I've loved it!

I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I expected to based on other online reviews. There is a good bit of nudity, but not a lot more of Dimitri Durdaine than anybody else, and (in contrast to at least two others, including Stéphane Rideau) none of him that would qualify as "full frontal" - "full side" is more like it, and even those rarely show much except skin. Some other reviews give the impression that he almost never wears clothes and that the camera examines every square inch of his body, neither of which is true at all.

What there IS more of in this movie than most is naked middle-aged and older men, which may bother some people but delights me. Except for Durdaine, all of the naked men in this movie have pot bellies, including Rideau (who's getting comfortably close to middle age himself), which is wonderfully refreshing in an age when only bronzed and hairless gym bodies under 30 ever appear in American gay movies (Can we say BOR-ing?).

Now that nudity's out of the way... There's something I like a lot about Gaël Morel's movies, but I'm not sure what it is. There's something very natural or unpretentious about them, something familiar and almost comforting, regardless of the subject matter. I feel like I'm among friends when I watch his movies. They FEEL good in some mysterious way comparable movies by other directors don't. He has an eye and a style and a language that are quite distinctive but not easy to define; whatever it is, I like it.

Don't let the crime element fool you: Our Paradise is above all else a love story. Vassili (Rideau), a rough, surly, aging hustler who is already in the habit of killing johns who offend him (and many do, since he's getting old and out of shape), finds a kid (Durdaine) beaten unconscious in a cruising park in Paris, takes him home and cares for him. Because the kid looks like an angel and has an angel tattoo in the lower right corner of his abdomen, and since he won't tell his name, Vassili tries "Angel" in various languages; the kid likes Angelo best, so that's who he is from then on. And from then on he is devoted to Vassili. Nothing that happens (and a lot does) shakes his devotion, and that devotion is the heart of this movie.

Angelo is not stupid or a masochist; he doesn't relate to Vassili as slave to master, cub to bear, boy to daddy, or any of the other gay May-December stereotypes. He simply loves Vassili. When Vassili sees that Angelo really does love him and has no desire to find somebody his own age, he relaxes and begins to trust the relationship too. It's lovely. All of their interactions, including several beautiful sex scenes, reinforce the growing strength of their relationship. None of the sex is gratuitous (whatever that means) or forced.

The backdrop for this sweet and tender romance, of course, are Vassili's increasingly rough tricks (since he's no longer young and hot, he has to do kinkier stuff to stay in business), which are depicted in pretty graphic detail, and his habit of killing johns who make wisecracks about his age. Angelo tries to get him to stop the killing, but it becomes obvious he won't, so rather than leave Vassili Angelo stays with him and occasionally helps.

It's really not much different from Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or any of countless other mainstream movies about criminal couples... EXCEPT: this is France, so even the murders are civilized, and (Thank God!) guns never play any part in the movie. (What a relief not once to hear the sound of a gun being fired!) There are no chases, no near escapes, no explosions, none of the noisy, overwrought melodrama that stuffs Hollywood crime movies like fat in a goose's liver. This is a quiet movie, a civilized movie, an intelligent movie. Every murder makes sense because we see them from Vassili's point of view. From the outside he may look like a psychopath, but we see the human being more than the crime; we see a man who is as gentle as a lamb with the (surprisingly many) people he loves and who wipes out the ones who make him unhappy. He's just doing what most of us would LIKE to do.

Even toward the end, when his motives for killing expand, there remains something about everything he does that just feels RIGHT for that character. He does it because he has to. He does it because the ones he kills need to be killed. He has his own moral code, and within that code everything he does is perfectly consistent.

I will emphasize again that Our Paradise is above all a love story, a sweet and surprising love story between a very young man and another nearly twice his age. This movie is about as unconventional as a movie can be - it follows no stereotypes of any genre, and yet it's somehow even more comfortable and familiar than stereotypes are; it's like a gift from an old friend. I don't know of anybody but Morel who can pull off a feat like this with what seems like no effort at all.

Even in a relatively free country, approaching prostitution and hedonism within sexual minorities is a challenge, how to remain below porn and above hypocrisy. To a large extent, Notre paradis has managed it under depiction, but at the expense of smooth and well-grounded plot. The viewers get no explanations to several moments happened in the past, and the inclusion of Anna's family splits the script in two in an awkward manner, paving the way for trivial, yet expected ending. The performances, however, are memorable and vigorous, creating a kind of uneasiness and letting you ponder on and over "indecent" matters...

One thing is clear: one must be an open-minded person to watch this film. The visual can be pretty, but the background and apprehensions never are.