The only reason I wanted to watch this movie was that even before its release, it had acquired the reputation of being one of the worst French movies of the last few years. And since I'm fond of "so bad they're good" turkeys, I thought I'd give this one a go.
Surprisingly, it didn't come off as particularly bad at first. The storyline is nothing new but decently introduced: after witnessing his sister getting slapped by her lover during sex, a retarded young man repeats the scene with a girl he's in love with before raping her. He's sent to a lunatic asylum for life while she goes to another asylum to be treated by a supposedly very good therapist.
And this is where the movie plunges into the unknown, so to speak, with the appearance of Patrick Sébastien as the divorced, long-haired biker who happens be the therapist in question. You see, more than just a doctor, the guy is the king of humanists. Solidly equipped with an arsenal of definitive maxims about life and the human condition (the most brilliant of which being "Absolute love is like a scarecrow that attracts birds"), he is deeply convinced that the girl is in fact in love with the guy who raped her. So he takes her to the asylum where Zef (that's the name of the retarded rapist) is and he confronts them daily until something happens. And what happens? Well, absolute love of course ! Miraculously, the girl relinquishes all wrath towards her rapist, she shares sandwiches with him and even teaches him to read before eventually marrying him!
Sounds ridiculous? It is. And made even more painful by the fact that Sébastien hammers as many silly and gooey clichés as he can: the mentally ill would be better off without medication, love is the cure to everything, male nurses in asylums are sadistic idiots, humanists are alone against the entire cruel world and so on... all of this interspersed with more terrible dialogue, especially during the scenes with the grotesque character played by Annie Girardot (a chiromancer who murdered her own baby!) who, among other things, claims "It's not us [the mentally ill] who have a problem, it's the whole planet". It reaches a point where it's too pathetic for the viewer to even want to laugh and Sébastien believes so firmly in all the crap he inflicts on us that it's almost worthy of admiration.
However, the worst of all is the rather obscene message that this movie conveys. Basically, it tells us that the best therapy for a raped woman is to fall in love and eventually have consensual sex with her rapist, with guidance from an open-minded therapist. I'm happy to learn after all this time that rape is in fact just foreplay to genuine love. So, ultimately, I got my excruciatingly bad movie. But not the one I expected. Not a laughable one. Just a pretentious stinker repellent on all levels.
Surprisingly, it didn't come off as particularly bad at first. The storyline is nothing new but decently introduced: after witnessing his sister getting slapped by her lover during sex, a retarded young man repeats the scene with a girl he's in love with before raping her. He's sent to a lunatic asylum for life while she goes to another asylum to be treated by a supposedly very good therapist.
And this is where the movie plunges into the unknown, so to speak, with the appearance of Patrick Sébastien as the divorced, long-haired biker who happens be the therapist in question. You see, more than just a doctor, the guy is the king of humanists. Solidly equipped with an arsenal of definitive maxims about life and the human condition (the most brilliant of which being "Absolute love is like a scarecrow that attracts birds"), he is deeply convinced that the girl is in fact in love with the guy who raped her. So he takes her to the asylum where Zef (that's the name of the retarded rapist) is and he confronts them daily until something happens. And what happens? Well, absolute love of course ! Miraculously, the girl relinquishes all wrath towards her rapist, she shares sandwiches with him and even teaches him to read before eventually marrying him!
Sounds ridiculous? It is. And made even more painful by the fact that Sébastien hammers as many silly and gooey clichés as he can: the mentally ill would be better off without medication, love is the cure to everything, male nurses in asylums are sadistic idiots, humanists are alone against the entire cruel world and so on... all of this interspersed with more terrible dialogue, especially during the scenes with the grotesque character played by Annie Girardot (a chiromancer who murdered her own baby!) who, among other things, claims "It's not us [the mentally ill] who have a problem, it's the whole planet". It reaches a point where it's too pathetic for the viewer to even want to laugh and Sébastien believes so firmly in all the crap he inflicts on us that it's almost worthy of admiration.
However, the worst of all is the rather obscene message that this movie conveys. Basically, it tells us that the best therapy for a raped woman is to fall in love and eventually have consensual sex with her rapist, with guidance from an open-minded therapist. I'm happy to learn after all this time that rape is in fact just foreplay to genuine love. So, ultimately, I got my excruciatingly bad movie. But not the one I expected. Not a laughable one. Just a pretentious stinker repellent on all levels.