User Reviews

As this story begins, we see Lea, a young woman, being examined by her gynecologist, she is pregnant. Her examination, evidently, does not surprise her. Together with her brother, Jeremie, they decide to hitch a ride to one of the Southern beaches. Meeting Sam, who is going South, they find a convivial young man who will help them get there.

Sam makes a stop to see his younger brother, something that triggers in him a kind of sadness and despair about an incident he witnessed at a an impressionable age, seeing his father taking his own life while sitting in a car next to his mother. We never learn about the cause of such action as the creator of the film does not care to elaborate on the subject, which is obviously a painful scar in Sam's psyche.

Sam, who is evidently gay, likes Jeremie, who obviously cares for him as well. Lea is out of the picture until the trio meet a young man, Mathieu, who picks up the undercurrent he feels is happening between his two companions. Lea, who likes Mathieu begins a romance with the young man among the everything goes among the young crowd at the beach.

The mood changes as Sam takes a trip to see his own mother. She has been living in another part of the country. This woman suffered a traumatic shock being next to her husband when he decided to take his life sitting next to her. Sam, obviously older now, comes in to her new life, never expecting she has a man in her life who, for all appearances care about her that is evident. Sam, in a way, feels betrayed.

Director Sebastien Lifshitz, whose "Come Undone", and "Wild Side", has done much better before. This effort feels empty in that nothing really is resolved in the issues Mr. Lifshitz and his co-writers, Vincent Poymiro and Stephan Bouquet present to their audience. It is an ambitious project, paling in comparison to the films that came before. The creators seem to be influenced by great French directors of the past, mainly Erich Rommer and Francois Truffaut, without the clear vision of the original models.

Yannick Renier is an enigma as the adult Sam. It is clearly he is attracted to Jeremie, but his own trauma gets in his way. His relationship with his mother is also puzzling. Seeing her happy at last, he cannot express anything to her that will bring peace to the way he feels about her, almost making her guilty for what his father decided to do with his life. Nicole Garcia has nothing to do in the film as the mother. Lea Seydoux is another character that is not well developed in the story. Theo Frilet and Pierre Perrier complete appear as Mathieu and Jeremie, respectively.

One can only wish Mr. Lifshitz success in his new projects.

Sebastien Lifshitz's "Plein Sud" opens with the images of obstetric sonography; then we have the face of the movie's only girl, Lea, and a small exchange between her and the doctor informs us that the pregnancy was unwanted, and that she has bile.

Cut, with a bouncing rock guitar soundtrack, to Sam's stern face (who occupies the film as its main protagonist) watching Lea dancing to the music in a field; sunny yellow letters invade the screen and the film begins to roll.

Why the decision to cut Lea's face to Sam's face? What is the connection between the two the director refers to? Enter Mathieu, Lea's brother, with a camera, a gadget that intervenes in the first stages of the film. Is it that Mathieu stands for the director and his intrusiveness? For we soon learn the reason Sam takes this road trip is some serious stake, some settling of familial accounts since his mother wrote him a letter, telling him she was released from a mental institution, years after they had both witnessed Sam's father's suicide. That Sam is secretive we learn by Mathieu's nosy discovery of a gun in the trunk. From then on the film displays a spiraling of perhaps youthful but inconsistent and obnoxious behavior on the part of the trip's participants (there is also Jeremie, a boy who wants a lift, too), but mostly Lea. I mention obnoxious not so much on terms of behavior, as for the rather pervading humorless attitude of the film: we are shown a bunch of - misfits, perhaps? - armed with the usual amount of righteous bile one expects form a gutsy french film concerned with youth, whose fatal airs seethe with rancorous self-indulgence. Are they any good?

The late french theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book "The Fatal Strategies", that if strategies, that is a way for things to escape meaning's dialectic, which bothered them, if strategies are not fatal, then they are fetal. This wordplay, that tries to subvert and radicalize any sense of passive psychology, is, I think, an exemplary sum and paradigm for that kind of french methodology, to put it that way. To cut also a long story short, is the area where the film proposes itself yet stays bafflingly resigned.

For it is somewhat obvious that this film is concerned with motherhood, albeit in an oblique way: Lea as a frustrated youth, madly caught in the web of motherhood, acting gratuitously toward her co-travelers, as if slightly cautionary in her tale, when contrasted to that other story of failed motherhood, that is with Sam's mother, but the contrast fails to illuminate any truth, as if content with the ambiguity of a lingering mood at the end.

Intersperse with that a jarringly pointless amorous interest between Mathieu and Sam: Lifshitz's flare for celebrating male beauty, is not celebratory here, but irrelevantly gratuitous. Also the persistence, if it is that, of memory giving us jots of Sam's traumatic childhood, cutting here and there, quasi-random as free association perhaps is, but devoid of any poignant dramatic effect: as if the film-maker wanted us to sort of witness a photo-album, taking us with respect (that is also respect towards seething repression) round a person's secret, safeguarding its enigma, away from easy, jolting and intrusive youthfulness, to which Sam's character remains largely apathetic, that's why when he abandons them the only reason this comes as a surprise is why this happens this late in the film. For there is no redeeming sense in the end, unless this comes from the lyrics: "keep my secret with you," the song advises us, but fails to address who "you" is, thus mistaking opaqueness for secrecy. "You" can be Sam, or us, but this is no delicate ambiguity; it lacks meaningful triangulation for a secret always involves three. As it is, any sense of the characters' pithiness, becomes exponentially hollow, and we fail to connect with Sam's journey. Is it that his father has taken his secret with him, and he now, at last, faces this and accepts what being a man is? Despite Yannick Renier's manliness, Sam's manhood is somehow, perhaps literally, edited.

It is a pity to witness Lifshitz's regression as a film-maker. His "Wild Side" was unpersuasive, coming after his poignant "Presque Rien": there, his sense of the elliptic was foregrounded in physicality, and physicality in a sense of working (class) consciousness, thus making the passions' inherent marginality resonate with us. If you want to see a film close to "Plein Sud"'s themes, check the exceptional sulfurous pastoral of "Donne-moi la main".

.......despite a "seemingly" happy-go-lucky Quartet of early to mid-20s Guys + a Gal heading South to carefree, sunny ocean shores. (BUT, wait....there's plenty of darkness ahead, and let's just say it starts with a bang).

(( A HURT SO LARGE....SO DEEP.......you close yourself off.....nearly close yourself down ))

Here's my "Brief-Take" on this 2009 production from France (only slight spoilers included):

• The main plot line of this story stems from an horrific, early childhood, traumatic event.....one which we learn of early on in the film.

• Added to what you were just told, this tale also gives us: Mental illness....family breakup....out of wedlock pregnancy....suicide....absence of parental love....and a killer Glock----you name it and it's probably here.

• It takes a little viewing time to realize that this story is, intrinsically, about only one of our Quartet: And Yannick Renier, as darkly brooding and angst ridden Sam works wonders with the part----this is his movie (I'm looking for more of his DVD work). Still, Nicole Garcia, as "Mom" really shines in her small role, particularly at this work's conclusion. This pair's end of film scene together wrenches us, as they talk of their past relationship: deep unhappiness having pervaded it. Yet.....we come to perceive there seems the barest hope of a turnaround----something that is the only thing that might save either one of them.

• Sex scenes, you're wondering? (thought you'd never ask). Both a heterosexual one, as well as a long-time-getting-there love on the beach tumble between Renier's character and another Quartet member, well played by **Theo Frilet. Though dimly lit, this is still an excitingly amorous scene.

• Finally, a look at the Closing we're given----a waterside scene which, perhaps, becomes an attempt to wash away years of sadness, disappointment and unhappiness.

PS--There is a "Moral" to this tale.....and it's simply: Don't always follow in Dad's Footsteps---or Mom's, either, for that matter.

I will be keeping this in my DVD library for every so often rewatching.....but for those of you looking for more "gay content," perhaps a video rental will do.

**(for you watchers of small, gay films, you may remember him from 2006's "A Summer Day").