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.

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.

I am surprised with the marks given by Imdb's users. Three years after seeing this film I still think about it, its music, its caracters, its mood accompany me. Mektoub My Love is a great movie, maybe not a masterpiece you would re-watch on an on but it's a great film, with a proper mood and a sensitive artistic touch. Among other things, it features a great sensuality and some brilliant actors (most of them are beginners and turn out to be really good especially Ophelie Bau who delivers a promising performance). Abdellatif Khechiche has this capacity to take the best out of his actors, he is also capable of captivating and bewitching his audience in a multi sensory journey. Khechiche does not make entertainment, it's not an action movie you should be looking for, it's a travel into his adolescence in the South of France, an ode to the youth, the non-endind summer and the awakening of desire. I think this film, a bit like "La graine et le mulet" which also took place in Sète (France), is very personal for the director. In fact, the heroe, Amin, looks like Abdelatif Khechiche himself (a young French man with arab origins who studies cinema...), the seaside resort he depicts really exists and you can't help thinking he's put some of his personal affairs in this story. What is interesting in Khechiche's cinema is how he shows the awakening of desire and the aesthetics chosen. I believe critics define it as naturalist cinema, a cinema that focuses on the flesh, the bodies, the lips sometimes even the driblle with an unmissable focus on the curves of women ; it's a cinema with a strong eroticization of the body but it's also a cinema that requires time, some scenes can be very long and Khechiche does it on purpose to insist on the desire felt, the games of seduction or to insist on the lenght of the night. Mektoub my love is a brilliant example of what Khechiche does best in that sense. Along with all that, the film features a social accuracy that gives a true insight to the film. It's not only about the birth of desire at the age of 20, it's also about a certain category of youth and summer loves. His cinema is always very realistic, you can feel the mood of a seaside resort, you understand its youth, its seduction games and you feel so comfortable that you would appreciate being part of the film actually. Like in "La vie d'Adèle", Khechiche goes very far into the eroticization of the bodies and the scenes at the beach (so beautiful...all of them), in the night club (slightly long I admitt) and the never ending approches between young adults reflect so well his cinema and the theme chosen : the birth of desire and sexuality at a young age. If you take your time (I think it's the key) and let you drift by Khechiche's poetry, you will certainly fall in love and enjoy being young (again) for the length of the movie.