Brilliant (spoilers)


The story consists of a tortured immature athlete, and his first love. The maturity aspect is crucial to understanding what the director was trying to convey emotionally. Most young men have problems communicating their feelings and this is why so many viewers thought the acting was lacking. This was established when the main character is constantly handed conflict (impoverished life, drunk father, academic underachievement.) All he ever does is work out, and wrestle. The machismo of youth will not allow anything that passes as weakness. All of this continues to pile up and adding to his insecurities. Just like life in general, when you don’t think it can get any worse, it does. In a moment of weakness, brought on by his over exertions loosing weight for a match, he allows a threesome to happen. Why humans that are down and out do something self destructive is not much of mystery. The old saying people are their own worst enemy is no joke. Anyway, there is no happy ending here. Sometimes when you play with fire you get burned and this guy gets burned badly. His pain is probably only obvious to stoics and people in close proximity. This could have easily been over acted, either all whiney or overly violent, but the director did an excellent job traversing youth by showing how bad this could be. I’m not a huge fan of movies, American or French, but as someone working on a master in psychology, this is a great cautionary tale. Everyone needs to be aware of the risk. Young people have no clue. They only see the passion and miss the potential for disaster. This was well acted and totally believable. Kudos to the maker for tackling this kind of subject matter since by sheer numbers of people this has happened millions of times. Even though I felt for the main character, the best performance was delivered by whoever it was that played his girlfriend. She made it obvious that this was her way of having fun. She was unashamedly adventurous, brilliant performance by her mainly. The seen with her getting counseling and medication to prevent pregnancy was probably one of the best scenes in this whole movie. Her attitude in that seen was amazing, and you can literally see the counselor flush when she said unfazed that she was with two guys and been inseminated four to six times. Wow…
As a future therapist I would have been speechless just like the counselor. People are so much more complicated than the mass produced Hollywood stuff kicked out today. Brilliant…

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I agree completely, great insight.

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