18/48
After years apart, the estranged lovers discover that every path they take leads them back together
Story
Local rebellious teenager Clotaire falls in love with his schoolmate Jackie – but gang violence leads him down a darker, more destructive path. Malik Frikah, who plays 17-year-old Clotaire in this film, was a world champion breakdancer when he was 10. One of the characters wears a Rolex Daytona Ceramic in the 1990s, but the watch wasn’t released until 2016.
Mes MainsMusic by Gilbert BécaudLyrics by Pierre Delanoë
The first part, with the kids, is pretty good. The film should have ended there for the audience’s sake. And Gilles Lellouche would have directed one of the best French teen romances of the decade.
The rest of the film, the second act, is terrible
Actors François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos lack chemistry together, their performances in this film being bland and uncompromising. I suppose both actors should start to question their own careers in French cinema after two newcomers Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah overshadow them and steal the show in this confusingly mediocre film. At first, the film seems to act like a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
A stylized and tacky male gaze
I mean the old story of injustice to a young rebel who returns for revenge and the search for his beloved. However, it turns out with an exaggerated and caricatured toxic masculinity. And halfway through and at the end of the second act, the plot loses credibility.
Which we have already seen
The problem is, apart from the weight of everything, the strange determination that the film shows in demanding originality in every frame it offers, without achieving it even once. Every time it has to decide, it always opts for the most formal, the most obvious. And so, it repeats itself, three hours of the closest thing to a French blockbuster, with good marketing and PR behind it, is what French audiences will see this year.
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