Dynamixor
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Voxitype
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Bluebell Alcock
Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies
BILLYBOY-10
Somewhere, out there, there must be a list of the all time worst gay films every made. One's that have overlong camera shots of the stars sitting and staring pensively into space, or one's where they focus unbearably long on kitty kats eating spaghetti. This motion sickness picture is a story of a boy and a boy and they live and love and swim and get stuck in grottos and one of them has a depressed mother and another has no mother and they talk and walk and swim and have sex and get drunk and then break up and someone goes to the hospital for eight days and then gets out and there is a lot of fast forward and rewind and there are long pensive shots of one of them looking into space or just sitting and doing nothing. I think it's some sort of gimmicky film making technique or maybe it's that the film is so bad they have to fill it up with long, wasted shots because otherwise if they had to rely on plot or story the film would be about 14 minutes. Don't get me wrong, this is about the 30th gay film I"ve watched in the past 6 months and some of them (most of them) have been very formulmatic, predictable and boring but this is one is really a terrible waste of time. The best one so far was "Beautiful Thing". So, I watched this and after the very first opening shot which lingered and lingered I thought "Oh, no, its going to be creative sinny mah" But I gave it a chance and watched it and then when it ended I tossed the DVD in the trash. Sorry I didn't like it and if you did, sorry if I offend.
Jay Harris
This movie could have been a real good drama of 2 young men falling in love & due to circumstances drift apart,.What we have instead is a very long 94 minute movie that seemed twice as long..The editing & continuity was dreadful, for example--nice beach scene,immediately followed by a cold weather or winter scene.;It was impossible to tell time periods, there were flashbacks without explanation or reasoning.There were too many unfinished scenes & the ending inconclusive.The acting was good by all concerned, the settings were very nice,The entire film was as dysfunctional as the families & persons involved. The English title is COME UNDONE it sure fits this movie.I normally do not agree with most of the negative reviews I read, BUT with this film I do agree with most of them.Ratings ** (out of 10) 60 points(out of 100) IMDb 5 (out of 10)
tnwestlake
First love is a desperately difficult subject to pull off convincingly in cinema : the all-encompassing passion involved generally ends up as a pale imitation or, worse, slightly ridiculous.Lifshitz manages to avoid all the pitfalls and delivers a moving, sexy, thoroughly engrossing tale of love, disaster and possible redemption, while tangentially touching on some of the deeper themes in human existence.The core story is of Mathieu, 18, a solitary, introverted boy who meets Cédric, brasher, more outgoing but just as lonely, while on holiday with his family. As the summer warms on, they fall in love and, when the holidays end, decide to live together. A year later, the relationship ends in catastrophe: Cédric cheats on Mathieu who, distraught, tries to take his own life. He survives and, in order to get perspective back on his life he returns to the seaside town where they first met, this time cloaked in the chill of winter.If the tale was told like this it would never have the impact it does: much of it is implied, all of it happens non-sequentially.The intricate narrative is essential to getting a deeper feeling of the passions experienced, through the use of counterpoint and temporal perspective. Fortunately, the three time-lines used (the summer of love, the post-suicide psychiatric hospital and the winter of reconstruction) are colour coded: warm yellows and oranges for the summer, an almost frighteningly chill blue for the hospital scenes and warming browns and blues for the winter seaside.Both main actors put in excellent performances though, whilst it's a delight to see Stéphane Rideau (Cédric) used to his full capacity (I'm more used to seeing him under-stretched in Gael Morel's rather limp dramas), Jérémie Elkaim (Mathieu) has to be singled out for special mention: you can feel his loneliness, then his almost incredulous passion, then his character crumbling behind a wall of aphasia. Beautifully crafted gestures get across far more than dialogue ever could.The themes touched upon are almost classic in French cinema: our difficulty in really understanding what another is feeling; our difficulty in communicating fully; the shifting sands of meaning… The film's title "Presque rien" (Almost Nothing) points to all of these and, indeed, to one of the key scenes in the film: In trying to understand why Mathieu attempted to kill himself, a psychiatrist asks Cédric if he had ever cheated on him… "Non… enfin, oui… une fois, mais ce n'était rien" (No… well, yes… once, but it was nothing). Cédric still loves Mathieu – he brought him to the hospital during the suicide attempt (none of which we see) and tries desperately to contact him again once he leaves – but cannot understand that he has lost him forever, because something that seemed nothing to him (a meaningless affair) is everything to Mathieu.Whilst the film is darker than the rather unfortunate Pierre et Gilles poster would suggest, it is not without hope: we get to see Cédric's slow, painful attempts to get back in touch with life, first through a cat he adopts, then through work in a local bar and finally contact with Pierre, who may be his next love. But here the story ends: A teenage passion, over within the year, another perhaps beginning. So what was it? Almost Nothing? Certainly not when you're living it
paul2001sw-1
'Presque Rien' is a beautifully observed portrait of the experiences of a young French homosexual. Eschewing both stereotypes and preaching, it's a wonderfully naturalistic film, superbly acted, shot with a feel for the seaside town where the action takes place, never melodramatic but often painfully real. If anything it's almost too realistic, as there's little in the way of conventional plot, just scenes from a life. But the absence of conventional dramatic tension counts for less than it might in a world so subtly drawn. 'Presque Rien' might not be the most exciting film ever made; but its simple humanism serves it well compared with the pre-conceived celebratory or bigoted viewpoints that often mar treatments of this theme. Worth a watch.
