jotix100 Alice a young student in France, is a tease. She loves to flirt with one athletic youth who appears to be of Arab descent, Said. This young student likes Alice, but she plays hard to get, and for all purposes, she has a thing in mind for him. Luc, another student, likes Alice as well, but he is too shy to act on his instincts. This girl is bent in getting her revenge on the more confident Said and she enlists Luc to be the one that will carry it for her. After Alice insinuates herself to Said, Luc appears on the scene and stabs his rival to death.Luc and Alice have to dispose of the body and for that they must take him away. For that, Luc has borrowed his father car and the body is taken to a forest to be buried. Unknown to them, they are being watched. The killers lose the way to the car, but they find a lonely cabin that appear to he empty. Little prepare them when a strange man comes into the hut and overpowers them to a filthy lower part of the house.The man has plans for the couple. When Alice plead with this person by offering sex for their freedom, he tells them he likes his boys fattened and his girls thin before he eats them. With that, it is clear it is Luc who is the chosen one to fulfill the forest man's own sexual appetite. Luc in fact, is sexually turned on by this crude man in ways one did not expect. When they eventually overpower the ogre, and only then, they engage in sex as the animals of the forest surround them in a sort of Disney reverie.Francois Ozon, one of France's best new directors, wrote this film of 1999 with the idea of perhaps retelling the fairy tale story of "Hansel and Gretel". The story parallel the children's narrative with a more menacing and cruel reality. Mr. Ozon's version clearly shows that it is Luc who is the one that awakens to the kind of sex that he has lusted for, but never was able to get. The film has a little bit of everything including cannibalism that comes into play in this update of a Grimm's brothers tale.The excellent Jeremie Renier, who has worked repeatedly with the Dardennes Brothers, clearly demonstrates he is one of the most interesting actors working in Europe today. He is perfect as Luc. Natacha Regnier, a beautiful actress, is seen as Alice, the calculating girl too sure of what she can do to the more impressionable Luc. Miki Mnojilovic does a good job impersonating the strange man of the woods."Les amants criminel" is obviously not for the great masses, but it will reward Mr. Ozon's fans in unexpected ways.

dromasca You should be warned that 'Les Amants Criminels' is not an easy viewing, despite being a French movie with almost one decade of age. What can impress viewers after the various 'Saw' or 'Hostel' installments you may ask? It is not indeed in the graphical details that lie both the attraction and rejection that this film can cause. It is more in the surprising combination.'Les Amants Criminels' is sort of a meeting between fairy tales and horror, between 'Texas Chainsaw' and 'Bambi' in a setting that reminds 'Blair Witch Project'. It also resembles Larry Clark's 'Bully' as the heroes are teenagers planning and executing the murder of a colleague of theirs, with the huge difference that director's Francois Ozon's heroes seem completely clueless and lack any kind of moral sense. If we can understand that teenagers lack social awareness, and that their instincts and search of auto-discovery prevails on the connection with the real world, yet we seldom or never have met a couple lacking any awareness about suffering excepting their own. Behind their angelic and sexy appearances the two heroes (very well acted by Natacha Regnier and Jeremie Renier) are cold blood murderers who kill and are horribly punished by a series of atrocities up to the size of their deeds. Their behavior defies logic, their feelings seem to be permanently wrongly channeled, and even their tentative of redemption through love filmed in an idealist and ironical manner is cut off abruptly by tragedy as the real world hits back with the power of a hurricane on those who have broken its laws.Did the director who also co-authored the script intent to make any moral statement here? I doubt, as the final scenes presents the main hero back into his convoluted logic giving forgiveness to his evil tormentor, whom according to what happened on screen we cannot consider but a tool of punishment and source of horror in the story. And yet the film does have a magnetism of its own, and the story as incredible as it may be is very well told. At the end of the film I did not get any better understanding of the characters, as their motivation seems to be impossible to explain or understand. I did enjoy however the exquisite cinematography, and liked the coherent logic of the absurd behavior of the characters who do not cease to surprise on the wrong side of our normal judgment, all over the film.

christopher-underwood This title appeared on my radar courtesy of an Amazon recommendation, based presumably on my penchant for edgy thrillers or maybe because I'd previously bought a French film! Either way, although I had heard of director Ozon and of the acclaim for him, he had not entered my consciousness and hence my surprise when a leaflet advertising largely gay product fell from the DVD box, which I then noted bore a quote from Gay Times. Nevertheless, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I popped it in. The film is truly excellent. Nobody is entirely as they at first seem, the film starts with a jolt and barely stops, it is full of surprises and, oh yes, there is rather a lot of homoeroticism. Nothing too worrying for a straight guy but it certainly helps give the movie an alternative angle. Seduction is so much a part of straight cinema we barely notice it but here we are certainly made to sit up and question motives. There is humour but on the whole this is pretty dark and probing stuff and a most involving tale for the more adventurous.

jetwimp This is one of the most harrowing thrillers I have ever seen. It essentially is a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel legend, where the waifs are two French students fleeing the police after their brutal impulse slaying of an Arab student, and the wicked witch is a woodsman with cannibalistic and pederastic leanings. I am always surprised when movies like this get made, first, because of the outré nature of the plot, and secondly, because the directorial talent involved, coming, apparently, out of nowhere, seems too good to be true. The final scene, in which wide-eyed Disneyesque forest creatures preside over the coupling of the young lovers, left me giggling in appreciation. The movie is infused with this same inerrant sense of irony. Not a movie for the faint-hearted, though.