L'armée du salut

I see a lot of reviews that seem to misunderstand this movie. It is a brutally honest look at life without any of the filters that society normally adds. It tells a story of a real life, complicated, beautiful and ugly and twisted. It really hit home to me. Well acted and well written. It says much more in its understated way than a lot of movies with intricate 3 hour plots and massive production budgets ever do.

This is the sort of movie that doesn't have much of a plot, but is compelling enough to keep you watching. The shots were incredibly beautiful, yet powerful. But then, if you were looking for a movie which involves a romantic plot or erotic scenes, you might just be as disappointed as I am.

If you are looking for a "proper" gay movie, this is definitely not one. I wouldn't even say that "gay" is the main theme of the movie - "confusion" might be a more suitable one. As an auto-biographical movie, I think it does a pretty good job already. I am intrigued by the movie to read the novel, too.

Bottom line: only watch this movie if you want to spend an hour or two to get to know the story of a person, who just happens to be gay. If not, watch "Hawaii" (2013), a movie with similar pace and cinematography, except that "Hawaii" actually has a plot.

I didn't know it was based on an autobiography. If so, I really hope that they chose the most boring and lamest parts of the book to adapt to the screen.If not, my sympathies to the readers as well. I am no Michael Bay fan, so I wasn't expecting explosions and I really liked movies like "a separation" or "about Elly" but this is just an experimental thing. Let's roll and see what happens. I don't know if I should care about the leading character that it's replaced after a very long hour when time has passed. Should it matter to me his childhood? Did I need such a long character exposition? What for? What is it about his adult life that needs to be explained? I could easily have imagined his background if they had only decided to show his grown-up years. This should have been compressed into a short movie. And like Robert McKee said: "Why the f- are you wasting my two precious hour with your movie?"

This film started slow but inserted in an interesting place as Morocco. I understand is a biographical story, but for me I felt It needed more information about how this teenager moved with a Swiss Man and ended up in a relationship and all those scenes came up from out of nowhere not giving a lot of info to the audience.

Acting at the end was not believable and the story got twisted by this guy ended up in a Salvation Army needing for some shelter , hence the title of the movie that, honestly confuses to the one who is watching at the beginning wondering why the title came up but not until the end of the movie!

It lacked a logical firm and emotional story, and not to mention the originality of it. I think the author of this story could save it if he would have continued giving more importance to narrate what really happened to this teenager after he stranded all alone in a strange city and could give more interest to all he had to be through to get to Europe...