Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

didier-20 Brutal to the point of pointless. The over-repeated ring of bones crunching, snapping and breaking is what you shall take away with you. A wasted opportunity, considering the time, place and people in history are much neglected by western cinema.The violence, which hogs everything, even itself becomes dramatically repetitive. The whole, inevitable, boring thing underscored by a vaguely religious male choral electronic musical voice which becomes camper and camper as the violence becomes more absurd.The landscape is all but ignored. The people largely reduced and the protagonists used to synthesize the maker's own indulgent idea of tragedy and masculine beauty. Sadly,the taught notion that thoughtless brutality is somehow elevating when contrasted with the prettiness of youth (or is it meant to be the other way around?) just felt immature rather than informed or emotionally meaningful.Such a waste. Just to add in it's favour, that the leads did bring good performances.

richard-2110 So far I've watched this film twice, without the assistance of subs though I don't understand French - to have been entirely enthralled throughout. Seldom are films of this caliber made, with what can be imagined as totally unrelenting period authenticity combined with unflinching performances by the well-cast leads. If there were only 7 truly different fictions in existence, just told slightly varying ways - this must be story #8. It has an utterly refreshing originality about it which reveals human nature in a raw sort of honest way we should see much more often. The degree of homo-eroticism is variable depending on your point of view - though very subtle, it is certainly there in appropriate proportions. Bound to become a cult classic!

Chris Knipp Belgian first-time director Micha Wald says he wanted to say something about brothers. World War II was his first choice but people told him production costs would be too high and that stuff's been done to death anyway. So Wald switched to an almost abstract world of wild boys and macho men, wooded groves and lakes, open shirts, sabers, fur caps, horses, to the region Wald's forebears come from and the time of the Cossacks. This film set "somewhere in the East" in 1857 can't be taken realistically on any level and isn't meant to be. How else would a bunch of Slavs all speak perfect French? It's hard to know how to take it, and for this reason responses have hit opposite extremes. Some French reviewers were enthusiastic, others dismissive. One Allociné viewer says "A pure marvel, not to be missed," another, 'Avoid at all costs." Within what everybody acknowledges was a very limited budget, 'Voleurs de chevaux' has daring and sweep. Wald pursues his story with the same intensity as his characters pursue their fates. But it's got a problem, genre-wise, because it's a boy's adventure, full of fear and innocence and exciting teenage daring-do, but it's too violent for kids to watch. And while the early parts are intense and fast-paced, it loses momentum and goes flat later.The story only makes sense as a fairy tale or a myth. Two pairs of brothers come into symbolic, parallel conflict. One pair steals the other's horses and the older of the thieves kills the weaker, younger brother of the pair they victimize by reaching down from his horse and snapping his neck. The bereaved survivor hunts the horse-thief brothers down and kills the older one, taking the younger under his wing as they ride off into the sunset. Along the way there are passages of bracing physicality and rawness but also of extreme violence--not just the harrowing encounters between the opposing brothers but the brutality of a Cossack training camp, and after training, wartime atrocity when the Cossacks wipe out a village, leading the brother recruits to desert.Adrien Jolivet, who plays Jakub, the stronger of the two brothers who join the Cassacks (and later get their horses stolen), has said that the actor who played the Cossack commander he fights with fists and saber (this is Michel Martin, I'm guessing) was an ex-fighter and they used real weapons, and it was all he could to do avoid getting killed. Jakub's younger brother Vladi (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) gets raped and beat up all the time. It's not a great role for Leprince-Ringuet, who's so appealing as the gay boy in Honoré's 'Chansons d'amour'--he looks bigger than the wiry Jolivet, and all he gets to do is cringe and weep. To compensate for being a little too slight, though, Jolivet (excellent in his father Pierre's 'Zim and Co.') has an admirable feverish intensity that's convincing for "Le traque," the hunting down, after Roman (Grégoire Colin) and his damaged, horse-whisperer younger brother Elias (François-René Dupont) have lured Vladi's and Jakub's horses away while the other brothers are gamboling in a lake after abandoning the Cossack life. (How that happened wasn't quite clear to me, or how they got to keep the horses.) Roman's relationship to Elias' is similar to Jakub-Vladi's, except that Elias is a drunk and young seducer and Roman is really harsh and violent with him; it's his mean trick when they were little that damaged Elias' leg somehow.Up to the theft of the horses things go pretty well. Then the film loses momentum and gets wobbly, even though the battle between Roman and Jakub that leads to Roman's slow demise is brutal and violent in the extreme. The last effort at raw, unheroic realism is exhausting and repellent, and feels more than anything just like sloppy editing. The two young men give each other deathly wounds, then struggle away on foot and horse only to exchange further blows and collapse in the horse thieves' underground hideaway. It leaves you feeling beaten down and hopeless. The closing shot of Jakub riding across the horizon with Elias riding a horse behind him almost saves things. It's a resolution in keeping with the film's mostly non-verbal style and fairy-tale overtones. There's a strange art-house purity about this effort, but I have a sick feeling that if Wald gets a lot more money he'll just make something overblown and pointless like Laurent Boutonnat's 'Jacquou le croquant.'Three of the young actors are already well known, especially Colin, an actor almost since birth, used repeatedly by Clair Denis and notable for his relaxed physicality and his ability to slide easily into very diverse roles. Leprince-Ringuet and Jolivet are both very promising, charismatic young actors, just not altogether suitably cast as brothers. François-René Dupont was a 17-year-old unknown, chosen for his presence, good looks, and in particular for the fact that he'd ridden horses from the age of six. Wald shows a certain panache, but his scenario is spotty and his editing questionable. With its physical intensity and occasional sweeping landscapes this is a film it would have been better to see in a theater than on a computer via DVD, but it never got to American theaters and may not have spent very long in French ones. It was included in the "Semaine de la critique" at Cannes in 2007 and its special nature will win it a following. We'll see where the director goes from here.

Pasky Set "somewhere in the East, around 1856", this action/costume film is a revenge story between two 'couples' of brothers. Jakub and Vladimir, two young Cossacks who suffer terrible humiliations during their military training and Roman and Elias (the two horse thieves of the title). After a terrible tragedy, Jakub leaves his regiment and tracks down the two thieves with what looks like a samurai's sense of honor and dignity. Shot in beautiful landscapes, with a minimum of dialogs, an impressive music, and an epic ambition, this blind and brutal race towards a metamorphosis (to free himself, Jakub will also have to become an outlaw) is also a study of dependence struggles (the two elder ones taking a role of father and imposing their choices to their youngest brothers). To appreciate this film, one needs to be sensitive to children's stories with a simple framework, disregard a certain awkwardness, and accept a very literary narration (three chapters announced by three titles: Him, Them, Manhunt), and a depiction of rough characters, the oldest thief (Roman, played by Grégoire Colin) almost turning into a kind of caricature.'Voleurs de chevaux' is a sort of equestrian western which was obviously made on a low budget. The reconstitution of a mythical European mid-19th century often misses what the big Masters made of it (one can't help thinking of Kubrick with Barry Lyndon, or Kurozawa with Dersou Ouzala). Micha Vald took a risk, but there is an undeniable 'soul' which animates his beautiful story: the confrontation, crimes and vendetta of the four brothers, bathed in the cold light of a poisonous and solitary nature. Between the end of their adolescence and the beginning of maturity, the four characters compose a striking fresco, which owes most of its success to the actors' performances. One can't help taking one's hat off to this group of very young actors who support the whole film: Adrien Jolivet and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet on one side, and Grégoire Colin and François-René Dupont on the other side. We won't forget the charm of theses ferocious dogs for quite a while.