Les corps impatients

This was a great experience in cinema. The film is very silent and realy moving. The cast is extraordinary. I fell into kind of trance by watching the human beauty which is this film about. Very rare that a film takes me so far away and let me be so much with it. I was ready to sit 8 hours in the cinema and was very full of emotion when I had to leave it.

Although I did not consider "les corps impatients" as a masterpiece, I think the director did an interesting job in filming bodies (ailing bodies, healthy bodies, tattooed bodies, desired bodies, rejected bodies...). Charlotte's pain - physical of course, but also and mainly her psychological discomfort when she understands that she might die and that the world will not stop revolving for all that, that her loved one will love somebody else and therefore will forget a little bit about her - is palpable and well expressed. Laura Smet (who by the way is no famous pop star in France... where did you get that???), here in her first movie, proves to be a promising actress (like her mum?).

Just the kind of film that gives French cinema a bad rep: incredibly boring, dull, overblown trash about coming-of-age uneasiness, sex without love and so on. Hasn't all this been forever buried with the worst of 70s cinema ? Lord, we even have teen angst pangs and struggling with illness subplots, and all filmed with leaden camera-work by a director with as much lightness of touch as an anvil. Keep the guy away from a camera, for God's sake! The film's only selling point seemingly was the nude appearance of a French pop singer as the 'star' of this dud. Good grief! Better read the tabloids if you're into that sort of thing. What a waste of celluloid!!

This is a movie about a very attractive young couple who enjoy a very active sex life. The woman discovers she has a fatal disease (cancer, I think?). The boyfriend reacts by having sex with other beautiful women. So the girlfriend decides to romantically push him toward her incredibly attractive cousin. This movie has the problem of a lot of modern French movies in my opinion. It tries to achieve an emotional depth, but this is compromised by the need to ALSO cast the most unbelievably good-looking--and not necessarily most experienced--actors they can possibly find for the three leads. It certainly achieves a high level of SEXINESS, but this is often at odds with the emotional depth the narrative is trying to attain. Parts of the movie--like the final scene--are quite powerful, but others are more trite.

Laura Smet plays the dying woman. She looks like a slightly less voluptuous version of Isild LeBesco. She spends a lot of the movie in the nude, and frankly she makes dying young of cancer look a whole lot more sexy than it probably is, even after she loses her hair. But even before she gets sick, the alleged love between her and her boyfriend is really only established by the hot sex they have. Nicolas Devouchelle plays the boyfriend. He looks like a tattooed male model here and his performance in particular sometimes approaches the level of Carolina Herrera perfume commercial. To be fair, some of the problem is his rather unsympathetic character, which I believe is meant to give this movie a darker feel, kind of like "Breaking the Waves". But his character comes off much more shallow than dark, and it just doesn't seem very believable that he is cheating on his dying girlfriend in one scene and sobbing uncontrollably the next (Marlon Brando pulled this off in "Last Tango in Paris", but this actor is obviously no Marlon Brando).

Probably the actor with the longest subsequent career here is Marie Denarnaud who plays the cousin, but she was pretty inexperienced at this point in her career. She looks like Adele Exarchopolous (or Adele Exarchopolous looks like her)and frankly I think a lot of men would probably MURDER their girlfriend or wife (and probably several other people) if it would get them in bed with her. And the sheer sexiness of her scenes is often pretty suspect, like a scene where she and her dying cousin take a bath together. This is the second French movie I've seen with adult females taking a bath with each other (Sophie Marceau and her adolescent daughter also share a--much more PG rated--bath in the French teen film "LOL"). Maybe this is normal in France, but it isn't anywhere else. And then there's the incestual three-way. . .

Let me put it this way. They say that it is physiologically impossible for most men to cry while they have an erection. I don't know if that is true, but I wouldn't expect too many men to shed tears during this movie. The problem is I doubt too many women will either.

The film features a quiet, observing performance by Laura Smet, as a young French woman dealing with a disease and the end of her life as she knows it.

Her boyfriend, Paul, may or may not be in love with her, and vice versa; her hospitalization only complicates the issue. He cares about her, up to a point (though, the fact that he smokes around her even when he knows the nature of her diagnosis comes off as more than a little disrespectful). She becomes increasingly more resentful, bitter and impossible, especially with the arrival of a cousin she hasn't seen if years.

EAGER BODIES is reminiscent of Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES, both in look and with a girlfriend pushing her lover toward another. The cousin would seem to be a perfect match. But, there's the flaw: there's no real connection between these two individuals outside of basic sexual attraction and being drawn together by circumstance. I wish one of them had taken a second to acknowledge that fact, but since neither one does, at least _his_ top priority must be sex. And, so one could reasonably conclude that he doesn't truly love his dying girlfriend, so why should we care if he is happy after she's gone? Why should we care that she would care?

There's no investment in these characters, and the film is ultimately rather passive, even when it takes a turn for the violent. I also found a three way sex scene to be as unconvincing as it was unnecessary.

Still, Smet is good. I appreciate the subdued tone of the film, and the actors are attractive. Not bad for a winding down Sunday evening on the festival circuit.