À Flor Da Pele

'Douches froides' ('Cold Showers') is a film by Antony Cordier that has been marketed in a strange way: the projected audience was supposedly the gay audience, but aside from brief frontal nudity in an innocuous gym shower room there is nothing 'gay' about this movie. Instead COLD SHOWERS is an examination of class, sport, experimentation, and emotional borderlines that are at once fascinating and frustrating.

Mickael (Johan Libereau) is from a poor working class family - his father Gerard (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) is a boozer taxi cab driver who lost his license as a result of a DUI, and his mother Annie (Florence Thomassin) is a cleaning woman in the high school gym: they live on the edge of poverty. Not a great student, Mickael excels in judo and his life is focused on his sport and on his girlfriend Vanessa (Salome Stevenin). One of Mickael's teammates Clement (Pierre Perrier) is from a wealthy family: his father Louis Steiner (Aurelien Recoing) is confined to a wheelchair and his mother Mathilde (Claire Nebout) is a woman of the world and society. Louis decides to sponsor the judo team, buys them outfits, and asks Mickael to work with Clement to perfect his technique and prepare the judo team for a French championship.

Mickael and Clement relate well and while Mickael is a winning player, Clement is smarter and understands the intrinsic rules of the game better. An incident occurs that forces Mickael to take the position of a wounded mate and in doing so he must lose 8 kilos to qualify for the championship team. The struggle to lose weight (his body is already perfect) places stress on both Mickael and his family and teammates. Mickael and Vanessa include Clement in their camaraderie, a situation which evolves into a ménage a trois as the three have sex in the after hours gym. Vanessa reacts as though this is the greatest physical feeling ever, Clement is smitten, and Mickael has troubling doubts. When the three decide to try it again in a hotel room Mickael is so conflicted that he does not join the other two, only listening to their cavorting in the bathtub feeling inferior to the smarter, wealthier Clement. But on the judo side, the team wins the championship and Mickael's delicate sense of self worth is restored for a moment. It is the manner in which the trio of young adolescents resolves their antics that closes the film.

Though the actors are superb and very beautiful to see and hear, the character development is fuzzy and we are left with little understanding or insight as to the each of the key players. The judo action moments are beautifully choreographed and the intimacy scenes are done with taste and fine lighting but with little passion conveyed. Though we want to identify with Mickael and his methods of confronting his coming of age, there just isn't enough character motivation to make that transference entirely successful. This film feels like two movies: a judo team's antics and a class-crossed ménage a trois. Beautiful to watch, but the script could have been more carefully constructed.

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 movie is modern up to the bones: it's themes (solitude, adolescence, couple, discovering of the self), it's directing (cool, distant, objective and full of human truth), acting (the two main characters, but also the non-leading ones), the music (a sort of pop-psycho-rock, very deep and touching), all of this concures to give us a wonderful movie. It shows marvelously the evolution, but also the dissolution, of a young boy towards maturity. The relations between the self and the others, the discovering of the flesh, the torment and the solitude of the soul, all of this builds up towards the end, which is a cry of loneliness. But the life restarts, and we know that life is not a tragedy but eternal repetition: the hero gets back into reality, more human and stronger. This first movie is promising for the future of Antony Cordier. There is however a little critique to be made to the movie. It is too obvious sometimes: it is clear that the director wants to concentrate on the bodies, on the physical aspect of reality. There is a great pleasure in this, and every modern film-maker and film-lover knows it. The danger is not to fall into the extremes. The movie runs this risk, but it holds well overall. I'm already looking forward to seeing it again. The ending is brilliant, and the song on the back is tormenting!

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.