In the tenderly framed new French drama Being 17 (opening Friday), two awkward teen boys find themselves coping with more than a full plate of cruel facts and choices. These include a long commute to school from a perpetually snowed-in enclave only a tourist could truly love; one boy's mom is inexplicably pregnant, while the other talks to his soldier dad mostly by Skype; the two are constantly in trouble at school for fighting with each other; and to top it off, each boy is mostly awkwardly smitten with the other, each lacking the social graces to do anything beyond making matters progressively worse.
Being 17 is that most marvelous of finds, an instant classic on the subject French filmmakers have traditionally excelled at: truly messy love affairs that upset social apple-carts for more than just the couple at the heart of the affair. The film is the latest queer love story from a master, Andre Techine, who 20 years ago gave us Wild Reeds, placing its young male lovers in the poisonous aftermath of the French war in Algeria. Wild Reeds set the bar high for movies where teen characters grapple with adult dilemmas. Techine now ups the stakes for us with a beautifully nuanced tale where a black kid and a white one overcome ethnic differences and complicated personal histories to forge a bond neither could have imagined.
The stories of Thomas (Corentin Fila) and Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) feature a well-intentioned if perplexed referee, Damien's mom (a perpetually baffled Sandrine Kiberlain), who apologizes for her meddling in the boys' world in this third-act chat with Damien after the boys' most violent school-hall fight results in Thomas' expulsion from their high school.
Mom: "I was wrong to invite him here. You didn't fight back? Why did he hit so hard?"
Damien: "I tried to kiss him. [Pause.] Nothing to say?"
"No. I'm just listening. What is there to say?"
Plenty, as it turns out, in scenes where the obstacles facing the boys are plotted out without seeming neat or possible only in a movie. Warning: there are moments where French ways will ruffle feathers at that august watchdog of film behavior, the American Humane Society, such as the scene where Thomas pays for Damien's doctor mom attending to his bed-ridden mom by snapping the neck of a live chicken. Elsewhere, Americans who have endured more than our share of faraway colonial wars will feel the poignancy of Damien and his mom able to converse with their soldier hubby/dad only by Skype.
The farm scenes where Thomas displays an easy familiarity with domestic livestock may resonate with farm folks here who still get their sustenance from homegrown animals and produce. But Damien's hobby, which feeds directly into his early fisticuffs with Thomas, is martial-arts training provided by a wizened old teacher named Polo. Here Being 17 resembles such American farm-boy queer dramas as the Ryan Gosling/Big Sky Country vehicle The Slaughter Rule, where his cattle-ranch-raised boy-man's agricultural background hooks him up with an older male mentor/predator with a taste for teen boys.
A very French note is sounded in the first act, where the boys' less-than-cute meet occurs when Thomas deliberately trips Damien in class after the latter has made what Thomas feels is a pretentious recitation on Rimbaud. You could probably travel the whole of our country without finding boys who duke it out over poetry. But as with 1994's Wild Reeds, Techine provides queer viewers with evidence of same-sex attraction with arresting shots of Damien eyeing Thomas' naked butt as the boy plunges into an icy forest stream.
The young actors should be singled out for special mention. Kacey Mottet Klein, as Damien, projects a special mischievous energy as the plucky lad who's constantly swinging back and forth between the impulses to fight or fuck. French film buffs may recall him as the rogue-in-the-making in 2012's Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, in which his pint-size boy artist-to-be sings a bawdy song in a very adult setting. Being 17 marks Corentin Fila's film debut �" he had previously appeared on French TV as himself. Techine makes good use of his young leads' expressive faces, their very soulful eyes.
In the end, Techine's film affirms the slogan boldly emblazed on Damien's T-shirt: "My Dream Is Alive."