Being 17 (2016)

Load of rubbish!!

Boring, long, and too preachy.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Being 17/Quand on a 17 ans. A really, really good gay/coming of age film. Not just about the kids' problems with being gay and their attraction, but also what shapes them as humans, with as much emphasis on especially one of the boys' mother, it was as much her story as it was theirs. Great acting. Beautiful, but not "big" cinematography - although the snow covered mountains made me almost miss snow - and I HATE the cold! And it was not over the top/sugar-coated as most American movies (or was about just drugs and screwing every guy you come near, as also happens in most gay-themed American movies) in this genre, which gives it extra points.

Nice story telling. The striking thing about this movie for me was the superb acting by Sandrine Kiberlain, who plays the doctor-mom, Marianne. The story is well written, and I can see why some of the reviewers seem to find fault with it, eg., "why did she invite her son's bully to stay with them ?"...but the way the story flows, it does not seem unbelievable. Some of the human elements are fantastic: when Thomas finds out his step-mother is pregnant, he tells Marianne that at last she will have a real child - to which she replies 'there are no fake children'. The delivery of dialogue here is fantastic. Same, when she finds out, finally, why the 2 boys have been fighting - her dialogue delivery and demeanor are superlative. The military funeral is done well too. The scenery has been used to good effect. The scenes of snow falling, driving in the snow, and of the isolated lakes where the boys go swimming in the nude in the middle of winter all add to the sense of isolation that Thomas has been used to living in.

This is certainly one of the best of one of France's great directors. The cast is perfect, and the two youths beautifully played. Their antagonism at the beginning is not uncommon to those who are still foreigners to their sexuality, and certainly not uncommon to youths far from any centres of so-called gay life. Their attraction is caught by looks that are touching, troubling and moving and the hostility to their own feelings, especially that of Thomas (Corentin Fila ) who lives a more remote life than Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein)who realises his sexual and emotional desires earlier, is perfectly understandable. I will not give away the plot, but mention must be made of the subtle and delicate acting of Damien's mother (Sandrine Kiberlain ) and her exquisite variations of emotions. This is the kind of film that raises homosexuality to a new level in world cinema, and I hope it reaches the wide audience it needs to raise hope, awareness and respect for a choice of love still a problem even in France, and yet no other country could have made this film in quite the same way. Louis Malle's 'Les Amants' which equally showed antipathy between the two lovers was considered a great breakthrough in portraying sexual love for heterosexuals. This film equals it in beauty of image, and its wisdom, and it is a crying shame it was not given the Golden Bear at Berlin. A masterpiece.

This film, which in English speaking territories is released under the title Being 17, at first has all the hallmarks of your typical teenage drama. There's two seventeen year old boys and a fair bit of animosity between them. However, where usually there's girls or social status involved in explaining said strife, that is not the case here. In fact, there's no particular cause for their mutual dislike at all, it's just there. So we can imagine the horror on the one boy's face when his mother invites the other to come live with them. It's a generous but odd decision, considering their rivalry is there for everybody to see. It's not the oddest choice Quand on a 17 ans makes, since the intention of this film is showing the start of a homosexual relationship. You'll have a tough time believing this film, which takes place over a period of about 18 months, will see the relation between the boys change from mutual hatred and the occasional bit of violence to underscore that feeling, to genuine, physical affection between the pair.Director André Téchiné - himself a gay man - is no stranger to both gay drama and teen angst. However, he felt the subject material needed the aid of writer Céline Sciamma to flesh the characters out to their best extent. Sciamma recently came off the teen drama Girlhood, which also showed rough relationships between youngsters (though all of them girls in that particular case), but despite the 37 year difference in age between herself and her director, she proves a right addition to make the teen dialogue that much more snappy and convincing. Aided by strong, not to mention daring, performances from both the young actors and their more experienced counterparts, the script goes a long way to make the unlikely transformation from one state of affairs to the other feel that much more real. Cinematography and editing do their bit as the movie moves from a snowy, cold opening to a warm and colourful close in summer, as a perfect (but rather obvious) metaphor for the change in teen moods.Nevertheless, for the audience it's still a far cry from hate to love (especially a type of love this deeply felt) in just under two hours time. All the ingredients are there to make us convince this is transpiring, but it just moves too fast to make us feel it with the two main characters. It has the pretension, conscious or unconscious, of an emotional epic the likes of La Vie D'Adele (better known as Blue is the Warmest Colour in many regions), but unlike that wonderful film, it just cuts the time necessary to make it equally emotionally compelling for us by a third. We cannot help but feel things are rushed, even though the movie cannot be accused of being fast paced. A change in teen nature of this magnitude simply begs more illustration for full emotional immersion, it seems.