Un momento di follia

I can't believe how bad this movie is and how bad François Cluzet, George Bush look alike in it. A very annoying, phony, stupidly written and directed movie. I didn't even make it half way through before it almost put me to sleep. No character depth, I didn't connect or relate to the characters at all. Empty dialogs that lack true emotion. All actors were really bad, but François Cluzet was the worst. Unbelievable for a famous actor like him. I though he was not bad in The Untouchables. I generally enjoy French cinema, but they were following Hollywood steps lately producing junk after junk like this one or "Tu veux... ou tu veux pas?" for example.

The film has a weak start and ends the same. I don't know what was I expecting from that review. It's a silly story, predictable, it was only made with the finality of being liked. Generally, the performances were a mess, even the soundtrack was annoying. Sincerely, I don't recommend this movie, don't waste your time.

I've watched this movie three times now, and each time it gets funnier. I liked the way the movie took its time to set the scene because you need to be quite tuned into the characters and the situation to enjoy how things unfold. I've always liked Vincent Cassel as an actor but have never seen him in a comic role; he was brilliant in this, really stole the show. His facial expressions were priceless and Francois Cluzet was his perfect sidekick. There were even a few more serious moments towards the end which I thought worked well and rang true. If you watch this with an open mind it's a lot of fun.

I loved it! You need to know Corse and its habitants to understand some of the great moments of this movie, it may also lose part of its great dialogues in translation. Vincent Cassel is at its best.

There is a reason that some of the other reviewers have noted that the plot of this movie is very similar to the 1984 American film "Blame It on Rio". BOTH movies are remakes of a now largely forgotten 1977 French film with the same title as this one, "Un Moment d'engarement" ("One Wild Moment"). It is interesting though that the French are STILL making films like this, while the Americans wouldn't touch this subject today with a ten-foot pole. It's very doubtful older teenage girls have become more virginal since the 1970's and 1980's, and the idea that a sexual relationship between a younger person and an older person is ALWAYS "predatory" (provided the younger person is old enough to be sexually active in the first place)is a lot more debatable than it is often made out to be. Are sexually active teenage girls really a lot better off with an inexperienced guy "their own age" who doesn't even know how to successfully use a condom?

For me though it is pretty simple. There are A LOT of things that seem exciting and enticing in movies, but would be extremely foolish and probably disastrous to do in real life. I definitely wouldn't lie down on the train tracks and let a train pass over me, even though it seems exciting when they do it in movies, and by the same token, while I enjoy the fantasy of movies like this (or the two earlier versions), I certainly wouldn't do it in real life. I doubt even in real-life France that middle-age men routinely sleep with their friends' teenage daughters, but the French also just don't have the ridiculous puritanical hang-ups of Americans when it comes to anything having to do with S-E-X, and thank god for that.

For what it's worth, this version does make one concession to our more cautionary times. While the young actresses in the original "Un Moment d'engarement" and "Blame It On Rio" were both slightly underage themselves at the time like their characters, the actress here, Lola Le Lann, was actually about twenty, and ANY male of ANY age will find her VERY attractive as she frolics around completely naked in the surf. Ooh-la-la! I do think they should have switched the male roles and had the more mature and repressed Francois Cluzet get involved with his friend's daughter as opposed to the more youthful and "dangerous" Vincent Cassell. (That dynamic worked better in "Blame It On Rio" where the hapless Michael Caine had to deal with the volatile Joseph Bologna, who was trying to find the older man who slept with his daughter). Still this is a pretty entertaining and sexy movie, but definitely don't expect another American remake in this day and age.