I found this to be an enjoyable film to watch, that at times had me smile and other times crying. Maybe its because I used to have a similar lifestyle and could empathise with the characters. I enjoyed the way the story unfolded and the interjection of the Super 8 home movie films that have been spliced into the film. I liked the gritty acting of the main characters who made the film for me, although don't expect Hollywood A class. But it was this acting that made the film for me, no pretentiousness at all. It also gives an insight into the more seedier side of the city - which realistically could be any major city in the world.
2 Reviews
Pathetic empathy for young foolish ugly ducklings
Dr_Coulardeau4 January 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Another film on « Love is a tragic thing » and all that comes along that line. They want us to feel some empathy for Darren, the third boy of the gay menage-a-trois in Toronto. They are in a way too young to provide you with the desire to feel any empathy for them, anything apart from pity. Why is it so? These boys are runaway boys who actually and really run away from a father, a family, a small city where everything has to be normal, etc. Run away with no experience, no knowledge of the horrible thing the world may be, with fear and at the same time the absence of any consciousness of risks. They are older teens, hardly, not even, not yet twinks and they are thrown, by their own decisions and will, for reasons that are beyond their grasp and their mental comprehension into the hands of a three-tiered world. Three tiers first because they are at the bottom, they are under the care of a house keeper and that house keeper is under the protection of a pimp.
But three tiers too because you have to satisfy the glands that are sold or hired to anyone who wants them for a nice sum of money to purge their own glands of extra fluids. Then you have to satisfy your addictions to all kinds of drugs and that is interlaced with the glandular activities and provides you with more chains than are needed to attach the Titanic to its quay in Liverpool. And on top of that you have love and love is a tragic thing, in fact a tragic mistake, all the more tragic because there is nothing sweeter than love, but you love for no reason you know. You just love and love is immortal, in fact it is fully mortal but it lives as long as we live and it dies with us.
Three boys, their caretaker and their pimp, that's nearly too much and too many. The three boys love each other two by two, so that the third one necessarily loves one of the other two and it is tragic and one of the two loves him and it is dramatic. The film is absolutely morbid at that level since it shows the impossibility and the absurdity of love and at the same time its sacredness, till death them parts, and death does part them and then the one that stays behind has to choose the second best or the remembrance of the first best and then dies in his turn, at least disappears.
Sad, sad, pathetic, and yet how can we feel empathy for these boys that are like chicks in front of a wolf, like ants under our shoe sole. And pity is hateful, pity is cowardly, pity is so old-minded. But what else can we do? Something is missing somewhere in their world and I am afraid love is nothing but an attachment that works like a substitute for impossible happiness in their total dilapidated dereliction.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
But three tiers too because you have to satisfy the glands that are sold or hired to anyone who wants them for a nice sum of money to purge their own glands of extra fluids. Then you have to satisfy your addictions to all kinds of drugs and that is interlaced with the glandular activities and provides you with more chains than are needed to attach the Titanic to its quay in Liverpool. And on top of that you have love and love is a tragic thing, in fact a tragic mistake, all the more tragic because there is nothing sweeter than love, but you love for no reason you know. You just love and love is immortal, in fact it is fully mortal but it lives as long as we live and it dies with us.
Three boys, their caretaker and their pimp, that's nearly too much and too many. The three boys love each other two by two, so that the third one necessarily loves one of the other two and it is tragic and one of the two loves him and it is dramatic. The film is absolutely morbid at that level since it shows the impossibility and the absurdity of love and at the same time its sacredness, till death them parts, and death does part them and then the one that stays behind has to choose the second best or the remembrance of the first best and then dies in his turn, at least disappears.
Sad, sad, pathetic, and yet how can we feel empathy for these boys that are like chicks in front of a wolf, like ants under our shoe sole. And pity is hateful, pity is cowardly, pity is so old-minded. But what else can we do? Something is missing somewhere in their world and I am afraid love is nothing but an attachment that works like a substitute for impossible happiness in their total dilapidated dereliction.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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