Garçon stupide (2004) Reviews

• Very mixed success

  Chris Knipp2005-11-17

  Lionel Baier's "Garçon Stupide" is touching and sad -- and occasionally original -- without being wholly successful. It blends material from both Baier's and his non-actor star Pierre Chatigny's lives for the portrait of twenty-year-old Loic, a French-speaking Swiss gay guy who divides his time between an assembly-line job at a chocolate factory in the town of Bulle; graphically shown anonymous sex Loic finds via Internet; taking photos with his cellphone (which makes him dream of being a photographer); and chatting with his long-time pal Marie, a more mature woman at whose place he mostly sleeps. The split-screen sequences in which Loic's intense, bold sex scenes and the hammering factory machinery at his day job get paralleled are very obvious; but they do have the virtue of sharply veering away from the saccharine, super-sincere quality of so many gay coming-of-age films. This director doesn't look away from the mindless, self-destructive aspects of his main character. Unfortunately "Garçon Stupide" ultimately plays out too randomly to have an overriding viewpoint. Loic becomes enraged at Marie one night. Her new relationship with a man has made him jealous. He calls her a slut, forgetting he's a super-slut himself. She kicks him out and says the relationship is over. This changes everything, since now he has no friend he can count on, or any friendly place to sleep. The film, which is a rough but assured collage up to here held together by its vérité feel and the tall, striking (if blank-faced) Chatigny's strong physical presence, disintegrates into fantasy and sentimentality after the breakup with Marie. A narrative that had seemed real now begins to feel like thoughtless improvisation. Something happens to Marie. Loic wanders off and has a telegraphed car accident. He cashes in his savings to buy a professional quality video camera. In a pathetic, pointless digression, he pursues a minor football star from Portugal who plays on one of the local teams. All this undercuts the simple specificity of the earlier sections and gives the film the appearance of having lost its way. Loic is naive, emotionally stunted, and ignorant: he tries to look things up in a dictionary but since the lacunae include such basics as Hitler and Impressionism, he has a long way to go to reach the middle-class/artistic life he dreams of. He is estranged from his family and without Marie has no one. The film, which avoids the conventional gay coming-of-age clichés, ends on a down note for two reasons -- because both Loic and his future are dim, and because director Baier lets his first film's promising opening crumble away into random pieces as it moves along. Loic ends with a long catalogue of things he is not going to become, but there's no sense of where he's going or what he will be.

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• Baier has a genius

  jsmith14802005-09-25

  Director Lionel Baier has created a work of freshness and imagination and truth. The few melodramatic clichés he employs stand out only for their rarity. In choosing Pierre Chatagny to focus his camera upon, Baier has chosen brilliantly. (Baier who plays an older friend, Lionel, to Chatagny's Loic, is glimpsed just once. In truth the director is a young man of 28 with much great work ahead of him on the evidence of this production). Though the character and, I would say, Mr. Chatagny at 20, is self-absorbed and vain as 20 year-old boys tend to be, his natural beauty reveals itself in every movement of his eyes and his isolation in the stark awkwardness of his stance. He is not hard to watch or gawk at for 90 minutes. Loic,a horny Swiss youngster who has notched a lot of casual nocturnal sex, envies his sisterly girlfriend's enjoyable personal relations with her boyfriend, distrusts Lionel's apparent disinterest in immediate sexual gratification and feels hopeless in the presence of an adored soccer player's fatherly love for his three year-old son. Luoc is by turns angry and despairing and anxious.He has begun to suspect it doesn't always boil down to just sex but he doesn't know if he has anything more than sex to give or take and if there is a place in him where there is more he has no idea how to reach it. But after much pain and damage the first unexpected crack of sunlight in the wall of Luoc's frustration comes through beautiful and true. Jim Smith

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• Sensitive Look Inside a Soul

  jumpy52005-10-07

  This film took me into another country and into another world. It is a sensitive exploration of a young man trying to get his needs met the only ways he knows how. Luic, the young protagonist, is sorely lacking in his ability to cultivate the potential for relationships that appear in his life. The longing and hunger for emotional connection is powerfully expressed throughout the film. I wanted the young man to reach out to the other characters in the film, and the frustration I felt echoed that of Luic's. Obviously, he did not develop meaningful relationships in his childhood. And this has placed him inside a glass fortress of his own design. The filmmaker captures the human suffering associated with the conflict between our needful souls and our quest to live a life that speaks to those needs. I look forward to more films from this young director.

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• A really great film.

  filmfan2132005-09-17

  I saw this film in New York and was blown away by the acting ability of Pierre Chatagny. For somebody who has never acted before in a professional production, he certainly has a bright future ahead of him. While many films attempt the same docu-drama format that Garcon Stupide features, I have yet to see a film that succeeds at it as well as Garcon Stupide. From the beautiful shots of the Alps to the intense night scenes shot on the streets that Loic works, this film provides a stunning look at a young man arriving at one of the most crucial moments if his life. Loic constantly blurs the line between sex and love and leaves us wanting to know more about his turbulent life, if only to help him discover his true identity.

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• beautiful film

  joelglevi2006-05-17

  I enjoyed this film. It has a lyrical quality, and it is essentially a character portrait. Many Americans will tire of the film quickly, because they expect clearer character development and a more coherent plot. But if these qualities ate not essential to you and you like French films, you will find this movie touching and memorable. (I know that this is a Swiss, not French, production, but I think most Americans will view it as stylistically French.) The main character and Chatagny's performance, reminded me greatly of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character and performance in "Mysterious Skin." (Many Americans will prefer this movie, though the subject matter is darker.) I love both films, both performances. I hope to see more films with Pierre Chatagny.

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