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.

I had high hopes for this movie, especially when, surprisingly, early in the film we see Stéphane Rideau as a somewhat slovenly, out-of-shape hustler. His benign and enigmatic smile is perfect for this role.

This is more complicated than a love story, and much more complicated, emotionally and psychologically, than a mere thriller. It's an ambitious story that doesn't quite make the grade. It's impossible to go much further without spoilers, and I do believe this is a movie that doesn't deserve spoilers. Other reviewers' citations about who is nude when and where and how and which sex acts are performed aren't fair either. This movie is better than that, or at least it aspires to be.

The photography and editing is clinical and detached and very much at odds with a sentimental and somewhat hokey soundtrack. The music used in one violent scene was so overly-melodramatic I found myself wondering if it was a reference to some old movie. It might have been, but I really think it was just bad stock music, and it seemed like a misstep for such an accomplished director.

There are other missteps as well, but the movie is eminently watchable, especially for gay men. It is not Gael Morel's best work by far, but if you like this and haven't seen his other movies, you will want to.

A kind of soap or soap-and-splash opera, with well played moments (like at the beginning Jean-Christophe Bouvet flamboyantly enjoying his vinyl record). Maybe engaged by moments of soft porn, the movie doesn't step back to consider its characters, let alone have them think themselves about what they are doing. Since it involves murder, there's a problem. The title may want to suggest that the central characters are Rimbaud and Verlaine, but the artificial paradise here is a pill at bedtime. The younger, Angelo, is there to be dressed or undressed, and gives no indication he knows or doesn't care what his partner is up to. Stéphane Rideau (the elder Vassili), with a hint of gut, can't be an éphèbe anymore, but he seems to know his business as a prostitute and what roles he can now play, so it is very hard to know why he isn't able to deal with older clients. The child, young Vassili (a genetic conundrum the name), does have a better sense of the plights he is in than anyone else.

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.

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.