SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

didier-20 The problem with this film is that it appears to have set out with the intention to be broadly exploitative about the wider questions concerning the nature of seduction, sexual awakening, discrimination , freedom and so forth.However the manipulative spectacle which governs the seduction of Jonas becomes so outrageous that it ends up becoming the central axis of anxiety that dominates the main thematics within the work. We slide quickly from ambitious reaching for parallels which involve evocations of idealised intellectual emancipation and a nod to ancient Greek love. Where do we end up ? Subsumed in uncomfortable realisations about the clumsy motives which lie behind the adult desires to which we are spectators. There unfolds a glaring itinerary of dubious motives.1. Jonas initially approaches his adult friends for help about a very specific issue (premature ejaculation) but far from helping him, they never identify the issue but rather use it to increase their grasp over the boy by introducing a confusing melange of pornographic speak. 2. The adult group effectively chase away Jonas' girlfriend presumably because she is not compliant with their intentions or power over Jonas. 3. We never actually see the scene where Jonas agrees to submit to a group sexual encounter. Because of this it is difficult to assess the moment he crosses over into their world and is entirely seduced. 4. When Pierre isolates Jonas and begins his own seduction the question which rises is whose pleasure is he really pre-occupied with ? The boy's own relationship with pleasure or Pierre's desire to sexually over- power the boy and fulfil his sexual conquest.Both Jonas and his girlfriend challenge the adult's power by backing away sharply at some point. The very fact of this awkwardness indicates a failure of Pierre and ultimately the adult group to transmit his/their noble sexual awakening project. The question arises, why did it fail or why was it so flawed in the end ?The abuse here is not strictly speaking outside the law and illegal so much as it is about the insensitivity of adults to the vulnerability and naivety of youth AS WELL AS to a notion of inter-relational abuse regardless of the issue of age. The adults violate their relation to Jonas when they use his problem with premature ejaculation to ensnare him as a candidate for sexual recreation within their group by not providing clear solutions for his needs but instead playing with him. They further abuse him by openly ridiculing the boundaries of his relationship with his girlfriend in what is an unforgivable act of adult manipulation. Finally Pierre abuses Jonas by offering a sexual experience that is closeted, furtive, rather squalid, lacking in a sense of fun and ultimately serving his own interests and this a a far cry from all the talk about the freedom of sexual pleasure as a form of self emancipation. It's a shame the film lost touch with what appears to be it's original broader potential. Had Jonas been seduced by someone who was more at ease with his sexuality, more playful, giving, indeed well adjusted as a feminine gay man, Jonas' seduction may well have been a positive portrayal of precisely the ideals Pierre harks on about. However the message of the film was in the end ambivalent concerning if it thought gay was OK as an option over and above a flawed notion of bisexuality devoid of emotional attachment which it was at odds to present to Jonas as the acceptable form of sexual fluidity. To this extent one had to wonder what Jonas had been taught in the end about sex, his body and power etc and if he had indeed missed out on a more effective awakening of sexual self knowledge which could have been experienced through more likable, well intentioned, wiser, better adjusted peers.

Lycian This movie depicts a sexual abuse of a male child by his "friends" who help him with his tennis training and school exams.The child has three elder "friends", one of them is a female. His mother and father are far away and he is alone with "them".There are 5 abuses depicted in the movie which take place when the child is in the "protection" of those elders.At first, the child is exposed to a sexual discussion in which the "elders" try to indoctrinate him about "infidelity" and they try to convince him to have sex with one of them.In the second, an elder, finally forces and convinces him to have sex with her while the child is drunk. The child's eyes are tied. Other two people watch him at that abuse.The third is a homosexual child abuse. While the second abuse is continuing, one of the male elders "take turn" and abuse him. At that moment, the child doesn't know a male is giving blow-job to him. He thinks a woman is doing it.The fourth is another homosexual child abuse. The second elder, who helps with exams, pushes to, convinces, and gives the boy a blow-job while the boy is trying to study to his exams.The fifth is again another homosexual child abuse. Like the previous, same elder "gay" person first gives him a blow-job then he penetrates the boy making it an "anal intercourse with a child".The elders use/abuse "Position of trust" to convince and push him to have sex with each of them.When the child accuses them for abusing him, the last abuser accuses him back with being an "opportunist". The movie takes side with the elders and it is depicted as if it is "normal" for elders to have sex with a child.The last guy says "I never did anything that you refused" or something like "I never forced you to do anything." And the child is showed as walking back into house as a justification of all this sexual abuse.I think producers, writers, and directors of this movie think that it is normal for an elder to have sex with a child if he or she doesn't "refuse." They should have known that a child isn't equipped with mental competency to cope with child abusers. You can't justify having sex with a child by saying "he/she didn't say no!" This is a crime against humanity.I condemn who contributed to this movie.

jm10701 Although I can't say I liked this movie, I'm giving it a fairly high rating (six stars) because what it does it does very effectively. I had to keep reminding myself that the creeps in this movie are not real people, which means the ones who made it did a good job.Unlike some other reviewers, the sexual element didn't affect me much either way. I neither approve nor disapprove of unrelated adults coaching an effectively orphaned teenage boy in the arts and sciences of sex, any form of sex he's interested in experiencing. If he's old enough to do it, and if he's interested, then it's okay. If God hadn't wanted adolescents to be sexually active he could easily have designed them to mature sexually at a later age, but he didn't.But what does bother me a great deal in this movie is the extraordinarily selfish way the adults treat the adolescents. They are cruel, shallow, snide, petty and totally self-absorbed creeps, and they push their creepiness aggressively onto the emotionally vulnerable adolescents. That emotional abuse is what I find repellent. The fact that Jonas and Delphine are children (and they ARE children emotionally, even though they are not children physically) is almost incidental.Pierre, Nathalie and Didier are bullies, and if their victims had been people of any age, even people their own age who were less aggressively arrogant than they are - and even if the focus had been on something besides sex: on money or looks or physical fitness or social class or something else - their behavior would have been just as despicable as it was in this movie. They are bullies, and bullies are always despicable.But the creepiness is so pervasive and so effectively portrayed that the director and writers MUST have done it intentionally. We must be SUPPOSED to despise these people, and we do. So this movie is in the odd class of well made movies that are intentionally unpleasant to watch because they're about despicable characters. Dennis Hopper was in many movies like that.

Maik Hoppe I'm sorry, that the previous critiques on this 2010 French/Belgian movie paint such a dark, horrific and - most of all - wrong picture of it's content and meaning.First off, let's get the plot right: Jonas, a young man around 17/18, lives alone with his brother near the Belgian border of France. His parents separated and his mother moved away and just visits them once ore twice a month. Jonas usually spends most of his time practicing to be a tennis-pro (just to get to a critique formally posted: you can not expect every young French actor to play tennis like a pro, bro) or with Didier, Nathalie and Pierre, friends of his mother, who play in the same tennis-club as Jonas does. As Jonas spends most of his time on the tennis-court, his academical achievements are not quite the top of the crops, actually he already is 3 years older than most of his classmates. Anyway, as most young man at his age, Jonas makes first contact witch sexuality (with a young girl from his school: Delphine) This stirs the interest of Didier, Nathalie and Pierre, who seem to have a very very good relationship with Jonas, as they talk (almost) openly about Jonas' experiences with Delphine.When Jonas isn't allowed to take the regular exams, Pierre offers, to prepare him for a special test to replace it. During this "private lessons" (which by the way is the German title of the movie) Pierre (Nathalie and Didier also) start to get very very VERY close to Jonas in the process of "teaching" him how everything works concerning sex.The movie does not (as previously claimed) deal with a "pedophile pervert" or "mid-thirties giving blow jobs to minors" but with the sometimes thin borders between being helpful, being close and being abused. Joachim Lafosse (the director) depicts in a very distant but still not cold way the subtle changes that lead to... well I don't wanna tell you to much ;-)After I watched the movie, I, personally, asked myself the question: When did this road towards "abuse" start? was it planned by Pierre from the beginning? Or was it Jonas' decision in the end?I think you should get your own answers and watch this astoundingly intense movie, perfectly fitting into the wave of Western-European new-age movies (for example the German movie "Everyone Else")Thanks for readingMaikP.s. : Excuse my weak English, it's actually 2.30am, but I just had to get some things right here ;-)