À Flor Da Pele

Love, friendship, family crisis, judo, ambitions of a young man, desolation, competition and ambiguous end. A French movie about small things of existence , mirror and lesson, without great ambition and little result. Interesting but not memorable, nice but not new,part of a very long series about teenagers, sport or lost relationships.The good part is role of an interesting cinema tradition. All ingredients are at perfect place. The circle of public is large and the end is good occasion to give your solution. Crumbs of nudity or social problems are only special gifts. Bitter solitude of character - seed for memories of love song and new beginning. In fact- nothing special. Only speech. About old small things.

This film deserves a chance to be seen. This teenage coming-of-age story from France tells nicely against a backdrop of martial arts (judo), competition, and sex. But it goes beyond to show some nice subtleties where class, success, and desire play out against one another to really give you a sense of what the main character is going through. I was pulled in. And the story just seemed to work and be very real and personal for me.

The director, who was present at this Toronto International Film Festival screening, mentioned the story started out as a school project -- something that garnered accolades beyond his expectations. It then grew into a judo documentary, before morphing again into a personal coming-of-age story with the director's personal story touches.

The result was excellent and succeeds on many accounts. I'd say it's worth checking out.

The movie is fresh, poignant and real. For a non-professional actor, Johan Libereau manages to touch you with his raw humanity. If he polishes on his acting skills, he will become a formidable actor. Salome is captivating with her open frankness. The other actors were quite realistic too, in their different ways. There are a lack of continuity with many scenes, creating the impression that somebody had cut out a big piece. One example, is when the Chinese boy(his arm was in a sling)walked up with the coach and the next thing, Michael is outside kicking a ball!? Some scenes could have been left out altogether, like the night swim which Michael had with Vanessa. My major pain was with the camera work. I cannot understand why a lot of the scenes had to be done in close ups. The most annoying was the group shower scenes where the boys were making fun of the Chinese boy. At one point, somebody's back covered the entire screen. I felt that 70% of the movie was done in close ups, causing you to miss a lot of the details, like with the judo scenes. A lot of the close ups were done exclusively to mask the frontal nudity. This shame is normal for American directors but with a Frenchman? Even the Parental Advisory sticker created the impression of disgust and abnormality which nudity is definitely not. I strongly recommend seeing this movie and if at the end you feel like strangling the cameraman, you are not alone! By the way, this movie is NOT a gay movie and the 3-way sex scene was too dark and lost in the close ups.

This is a movie about a teenage love triangle with two boys and a girl. One of the boys is from a relatively wealthy family, while the other, the main protagonist, is from a troubled family with an alcoholic cabdriver father, who are so poor they have to periodically turn off the power, which is why he has to take cold showers (although that may not be why some members of the audience will have to take cold showers). The plot of this movie sounds like a John Hughes flick, but this is a FRENCH movie and has something John Hughes movies definitely DON'T have, I think it's pronounced "menage a trois". If only the characters in "Pretty Pink" (or more recently, the vampire, the werewolf and Kristen Stewart in the "Twilight" saga) had thought of this, we could have been spared a lot of needless teen angst.

Interestingly, the first menage a trois occurs BEFORE the love triangle emerges when the poor kid spontaneously decides to share his sexy girlfriend with his wealthier buddy after a co-ed wresting practice goes very awry. The movies never quite delves into full-blown bisexuality, and I don't know why because there is certainly no shortage of blatant homoeroticism. The two males both love wrestling, taking showers, and occasionally wrestling in the shower. The girl (Salome Stevenin, who could probably turn gay men straight) actually has fewer full-frontal nude scenes than the two males, but one of them is another scene you're probably never going to see in an American teen flick where she wipes down her upper thighs after having (apparently) unprotected sex with both guys.

I should add that nobody here looks anything like an actual teenager. All three leads are obviously very good-looking twenty-somethings (even the French don't use actual underage actors in movies this graphic). And while they're less sexually repressed in France, I don't think it's common for French teenagers to have three ways in school gyms and showers. Ironically though considering how graphic this is in parts, the teens here seem a lot less sexually obsessed than American teens in movies, who always seem to be single-minded virgins trying to "lose it" as if it were the quest for the Holy Grail as opposed to something that inevitably happens to pretty much everyone with functioning genitals. Few people realize that this whole "horny male virgin" plot in American movies was borrowed wholesale in the early 80's from the Israeli "Lemon Popsicle" series, which was set in the FIFTIES for christsake. The French aren't stuck in this time warp and they treat teen sex much more matter-of-factly with slightly more realistic teen characters who occasionally think of something else besides just getting their naughty bits wet.

Even as a teen, I only watched stupid teen movies for the gratuitous nudity by the attractive 25-year-old "teen" actresses. But even that went away in the benighted John Hughes era, and strangely "American Pie" brought back the raunch and ridiculously sex-obsessed teen virgin stereotypes, but it didn't really bring back the gratuitous nudity/sex. Ironically, American teen movies today not only probably send a bad message to teenagers about sex, but bore the hell out of any adults expecting to see any. By that standard this French film with its unveiled homoeroticism and rather graphic sex scenes is really quite an improvement.

I don't comment usually, so my review's probably not going to be too helpful, but I figure the comment list is currently empty, so...

I just saw this at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday (with English subtitles) and can say that this is a very good film with excellent performances from its young leads. Johan (I can't remember how to spell his last name, so I won't try) does an excellent job of portraying the depth and complexity of Mickael and the film rarely (if ever) seems overly dramatic. While some of the smaller roles, such as Mickael's family, seem like they could use a tad more rounding out, the story is ultimately made very emotionally engaging. The nudity is plentiful (for my American background, anyway) but most of these scenes earn their place in the film with their overwhelming effectiveness. I'd like to give it a 7.5, but IMDb won't allow decimals.