Les enfants rouges

This is the kind of work which is meant for a limited audience;It's sixteeen minutes (you read well) of voice-over before the actors speak . Filmed on location,like in the golden days of the Nouvelle Vague ,the black and white pictures are perhaps too overpolished but they 're nice to look at . It tells the story of two young persons:

Alexandre does soul-searching ;he buys a gun because it gives some power over the mortals he meets every day;he wanders through the streets ,in the subway,he meets people but does not pay attention to them;when Garance meets him for the first time ,she smiles at him ,whe wants to make friends with him,but he does not seem to care .When he follows her in her room ,he asks her to make love ,but she does not agree because she does think that "making love" kills love ,more,that's it's the opposite of love .

Garance has just broken up with Alexandre ,a boy she loved dearly and she cannot get over it ;she' s in search of another human being :when you do love somebody,you love the whole world.

Both join a "political students group" :they want to change the world ,as their elders did half a century before them ;oddly ,one of them says that their friendship must be able to win over the world ,a parallel with Garance's lost love.

Too often ,the director resorts to voice over , which may get on many viewers' nerves in the long run;all the story is told in the conditional tense ,which produces the alienation effect ;an UFO on the "feel good" scene of the contemporary French cinema

Please please don't put us through the same old Nouvelle Vague treadmill again.

In spite of a nice black and white cinematography ,it's intellectual self-indulgence ;"avant-garde ,isn't it French for b....s...... ? John Lennon once said.

"Les Enfants Rouges" sees the director succumb to the sixties highbrow directors' vices: a vague script ,or no script at all ,for the story is told in the conditional by an infuriating voice over :we are bombarded with a language logorrhoea all long the way ;people out of the social context , spending most of the time navel-gazing;we never see them work (unless Garance's short baby-sitting scene counts) or study (as for the students,they speak of changing the world ,but they do not have the slightest problem to make ends meet (their parents must provide them with the money)

Alexandre's final act does not make sense ,but as it does not happen,it might have happened,that changes everything!