Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno

'Mektoub my love Canto Uno' has devided professional critics.

It is easy to denounce its lack of former plot line, length (3hrs) and voyeurism. Although these accusations are valid, who let himself completely immerse into it will feel undoubtedly rewarded.

It is not a boring film and quite captivating actually. I was even craving for more..

The action takes place in Sète, a southern France resort town on the Mediterranean. Amin, a shy student of Tunisian background who came back to his home town for summer, hangs out with friends and girls on holidays. Bodies and characters faces are shot with the delightful summer light which gives an extra touch of sensuality to the whole story.

The film shows like no other movie before it what it really feels to be young, beautiful and on holidays. The camera is so close from the group that the viewer feels actually part of the band.

It can work as a time machine (for the ones who have enjoyed similar experiences) or better as a machine that sucks you into the present, a call that is so powerful that one can hardly get out of it unharmed.

Kechiche's tour de force is to create a fiction that feels so real it could be a documentary on sociability, family, seduction and love at 20 something.

For the viewer who has let go and enjoyed this piece of cinema at his true value it is hard not to regard 'Mektoub my love' as an original, authentic, peculiar masterpiece.

Basically, lots of flesh. Scandalous, considering the action takes places in a muslim country, but the waves of visiting tourists makes flirt & nudity an everyday business. Amin's gaze is of an non-judgmental observer, reluctunt to engage. Love has little to do with the place, except for the lambs maybe - a cliche for innocence. Op-ending, the movie (hardly a story) lacks a morale; sometimes life is such.

Kechiche intuitively knows how to film bodies and the souls that drive them. It's an organic cinema, distilled in the most nostalic and melancholic barrel. We're all trapped on that beach, surrounded by love on a warm summer afternoon.

Always.

In fact Abdellatif Kechiche dreams of making a series. The length of his films is justified by his desire to make a documentary on the social engineering between these characters on the Mediterranean coast who spend their time talking to say nothing. Each scene is treated as a piece of bravura, as a montage sequence with a multitude of details and interactions between characters who have nothing to say to each other. That is to say, Kechiche's camera wants to be at the center of the people, at the center of their interactions, like a documentary, to reflect a reality, which is very positive here, and the film is extremely brilliant in terms of staging, or rather capturing the scenes. But each of these montage sequences would have been treated in a very different way by many filmmakers with multiple ellipses or not shown at all.

Moreover, Abdellatif Kechiche's other passion is to show women's bodies, especially their asses and breasts. It is not unpleasant, because the film is very naturalistic on this subject. It must be admitted that these characters are not exciting and that is the limit of the film. Stretching out these character interactions over 180 minutes would have been much better as a series in, say, twenty-minute modules, with each scene lasting twenty minutes; and the series format would add even more.

It's brilliant in terms of direction. But boring on the diegetic level. The evolutions of the main character touch us weakly.

This is a film that's hard to review; it is technically well done, but once in a while you wonder why you are watching what you're watching.

The film offers many ingredients of a good coming-of-age story: realistic characters, realistic character developments, realistic scenarios, realistic dialogues. Its perspective is not moralistic; It neither blames nor encourages any of its characters' different approaches to sex and life.

The problem, however, is that if you cut one hour of the movie out, it wouldn't lose any significance. Indeed, a lot of the film is plain gazing at the plump bodies of women, but the thing is that the gazed body parts do not add anything to the film. One could argue that the long sex scene in La Vie d'Adele gave the viewer an opportunity to get acquainted with the characters since the way a person has sex also tells a lot about them. The same argument sadly cannot be given in this film. Hence, you have a three hour long movie instead of two. Nonetheless, the longevity of the film does not mean that the film is stretched out. Three hours pass by in a relatively quick fashion (especially if you like women).

I just hope women and the animals in the movie did not have to endure shootings that they didn't particularly enjoy, considering Léa Seydoux's and Adele Exarchopoulos's harsh comments on the director at the time.