4 stars
the image below will give you a pretty good idea what the movie is about:
the movie itself is somewhere between “Lolita” ( 1997 ) and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” ( 2019 )
by that i mean it’s the same actress and director as “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” but it’s 12 years earlier which makes it borderline child porn like “Lolita” …
the movie starts out with some gratuitous child skin which makes you think you’re watching an original French inspiration for Netflix’s “cuties” but then it somehow skids into a more serious movie …
this is actually pretty clever - the movie grabs your attention with half naked children early on so you don’t change the channel or walk out of the theater but after a while when you actually begin to identify with the characters this whole angle of the film sort of fades out and is replaced by some sort of a coming of age drama …
basically the movie starts out as if it was made for pedophiles … but in the second half it is clearly a movie made for young girls … to try and turn them into lesbians
oh yeah it’s about friendship as well …
having watched two films from this ( female ) director well obviously the director is a lesbian and makes movies about love more so than sex but as a male i’m interested to see how men are portrayed … in case of this director ( Celine Sciamma ) it seems she mostly tries to avoid having men in her movies and when they are present she paints them as basically retarded sex obsessed but harmless animals …
men aren’t painted as evil or even disgusting … this director places the blame for the struggles of lesbians on the society rather than on men … which i appreciate
in fact all the guys in this film are hot … yet irrelevant …
it is refreshing to see a lesbian director not try and paint men as evil … instead she paints men as simply not important and of little value except what artificial value society assigns to them …
a nuanced approach … i can appreciate that.
the film doesn’t really teach any lessons but is surprisingly realistic and well made.
the protagonist is the girl on the right in both pics ( the smaller one ).