BÌNH LUẬN:
Thiên Đường Đôi Ta (Our Paradise) - Bộ Phim Về Cái Ác Nhân Sinh và Thiên Đường Hoang Tưởng [Jeffrey Thai]
MOVIE INFO
Seasoned Paris hustler Vassili finds his brutal past returning with a vengeance after falling for a man he discovers unconscious in a local cruising area, and nursing the handsome stranger back to health. When the young man recovers, the two men hit the streets as prostitutes, and begin robbing their clients. Later, an act of violence from Vassili's past threatens to have tragic repercussions, forcing the two criminals to flee the city. But no matter how far Vassili runs, his demons always seem to catch up with him.
Vassili là gã điếm từng trải hoạt động ở thành phố Paris. Khi bắt gặp một cậu điếm xa lạ đẹp trai bất tỉnh trong một khu vực mồi chài giữa thành phố, gã đưa cậu về nhà chăm sóc và rồi phải lòng cậu. Đó cũng chính là lúc quá khứ hung bạo pha lẫn hận thù quay trở về lại với gã. Khi cậu điếm trẻ hồi phục, gã cùng cậu lại ra đường hành nghề và bắt đầu cướp bóc tài sản của các khách hàng. Sau đó, do một hành động bạo lực mà gã phạm phải trong quá khứ đe dọa mang đến một hậu quả bi thảm, cả hai buộc lòng phải trốn khỏi thành phố. Nhưng cho dù gã có cao bay xa chạy bao xa, ma quỉ trong con người gã vẫn bám theo ráo riết
Theatrical release poster
| |
| Directed by | Gaël Morel |
|---|---|
| Produced by | Paulo Branco |
| Written by | Gaël Morel |
| Starring | Stéphane Rideau Dimitri Durdaine Béatrice Dalle |
| Music by | Camille Rocailleux Louis Sclavis |
| Edited by | Catherine Schwartz |
| Distributed by | Alfama Film |
| Release dates |
|
| Running time | 100 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Budget | €600,000 (estimated) |
7.13.2012
BY EDDIE SHAPIRO
Gael Morel's French-language homicidal hustler movie may be bloody, but it's never boring
No one likes getting older but, boy, Vassili really doesn’t like getting older. And who can blame him? As writer-director Gaël Morel explains it: The Parisians may like their wine and cheese aged, but not their hustlers. So, as the protagonist of Our Paradise, Vassili decides he doesn’t like the Parisians and before you know it, he’s killing them.
He tries to capture youth by partnering with the beautiful Angelo, but as Angelo is favored, Vassili’s rage (and bloodlust) grows. It’s an ugly story (as most stories about sociopaths are) but thanks to Morel’s exquisite direction, it’s never less than fascinating.
Excellent performances from Stephane Rideau, Dimitri Durdaine, and Beatrice Dalle (Betty Blue) also keep the movie from ever veering into camp or melodrama. Like Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers, the characters in Our Paradise are unforgiveable yet remain totally compelling—and even moving. But let’s face it: Even unspeakable violence is more palatable when it’s in French.
FLEEING TO PARADISE
By SHAUN DE WAAL
Our Paradise, the other festival movie I saw, has no such hesitancies. Not that this French feature goes all the way to arty pornography, but neither does it feel like it’s leaving such moments incomplete. Given that it’s about rentboys, it certainly should be able to deal with sex with reasonable frankness, which it does; rentboys have to handle clients with some really odd tastes, too, and there’s one scene in Our Paradise that induces such a squirm that it’s actually a relief when it ends in violence.
The lead is Stéphane Rideau, who may be recalled from André Téchiné’s lovely Wild Reeds of 1994, when Rideau was a mere 18. (He was also in François Ozon’s Sitcom, which played at an Out in Africa festival a few years ago, but I seem to have deleted that mental file.) Here he does sterling acting work as Vassili, a sexual gun for hire who has just reached the age of 30 — the age at which, it seems, most rentboys begin to consider retirement if they haven’t already.
Vassili feels decidedly homicidal towards his clients, but when he finds a younger, blonder man (Dimitri Durdaine) who’s been beaten up in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’s cruising park, a whole lot of suppressed love and caring instincts well up in him. We are told zero about this youth’s background, and Vassili discovers zero; he just names him Angelo and takes him home.
A touching interaction between Vassili and Angelo develops, but, as befits people who already have at least one foot in the world of criminality, they are soon on the run. This places Our Paradise squarely in the tradition of À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le Fou, to name just two French on-the-run movies, and it is towards some notional paradise of family, warmth and connection that they are fleeing.
It’s beautifully done, with strong performances all round, but one sees from pretty early on that this movie is in a genre at which the French excel — Beautiful but Depressing. All too easily, paradise becomes inferno.
REVIEW:
Surprising love story, completely free of stereotypes (by jm10701, USA,09/08/2012)
I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I expected to based on other online reviews. There is a good bit of nudity, but not a lot more of Dimitri Durdaine than anybody else, and (in contrast to at least two others, including Stéphane Rideau) none of him that would qualify as "full frontal" - "full side" is more like it, and even those rarely show much except skin. Some other reviews give the impression that he almost never wears clothes and that the camera examines every square inch of his body, neither of which is true at all.
What there IS more of in this movie than most is naked middle-aged and older men, which may bother some people but delights me. Except for Durdaine, all of the naked men in this movie have pot bellies, including Rideau (who's getting comfortably close to middle age himself), which is wonderfully refreshing in an age when only bronzed and hairless gym bodies under 30 ever appear in American gay movies (Can we say BOR-ing?).
Now that nudity's out of the way... There's something I like a lot about Gaël Morel's movies, but I'm not sure what it is. There's something very natural or unpretentious about them, something familiar and almost comforting, regardless of the subject matter. I feel like I'm among friends when I watch his movies. They FEEL good in some mysterious way comparable movies by other directors don't. He has an eye and a style and a language that are quite distinctive but not easy to define; whatever it is, I like it.
Don't let the crime element fool you: Our Paradise is above all else a love story. Vassili (Rideau), a rough, surly, aging hustler who is already in the habit of killing johns who offend him (and many do, since he's getting old and out of shape), finds a kid (Durdaine) beaten unconscious in a cruising park in Paris, takes him home and cares for him. Because the kid looks like an angel and has an angel tattoo in the lower right corner of his abdomen, and since he won't tell his name, Vassili tries "Angel" in various languages; the kid likes Angelo best, so that's who he is from then on. And from then on he is devoted to Vassili. Nothing that happens (and a lot does) shakes his devotion, and that devotion is the heart of this movie.
Angelo is not stupid or a masochist; he doesn't relate to Vassili as slave to master, cub to bear, boy to daddy, or any of the other gay May-December stereotypes. He simply loves Vassili. When Vassili sees that Angelo really does love him and has no desire to find somebody his own age, he relaxes and begins to trust the relationship too. It's lovely. All of their interactions, including several beautiful sex scenes, reinforce the growing strength of their relationship. None of the sex is gratuitous (whatever that means) or forced.
The backdrop for this sweet and tender romance, of course, are Vassili's increasingly rough tricks (since he's no longer young and hot, he has to do kinkier stuff to stay in business), which are depicted in pretty graphic detail, and his habit of killing johns who make wisecracks about his age. Angelo tries to get him to stop the killing, but it becomes obvious he won't, so rather than leave Vassili Angelo stays with him and occasionally helps.
It's really not much different from Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or any of countless other mainstream movies about criminal couples... EXCEPT: this is France, so even the murders are civilized, and (Thank God!) guns never play any part in the movie. (What a relief not once to hear the sound of a gun being fired!) There are no chases, no near escapes, no explosions, none of the noisy, overwrought melodrama that stuffs Hollywood crime movies like fat in a goose's liver. This is a quiet movie, a civilized movie, an intelligent movie. Every murder makes sense because we see them from Vassili's point of view. From the outside he may look like a psychopath, but we see the human being more than the crime; we see a man who is as gentle as a lamb with the (surprisingly many) people he loves and who wipes out the ones who make him unhappy. He's just doing what most of us would LIKE to do.
Even toward the end, when his motives for killing expand, there remains something about everything he does that just feels RIGHT for that character. He does it because he has to. He does it because the ones he kills need to be killed. He has his own moral code, and within that code everything he does is perfectly consistent.
I will emphasize again that Our Paradise is above all a love story, a sweet and surprising love story between a very young man and another nearly twice his age. This movie is about as unconventional as a movie can be - it follows no stereotypes of any genre, and yet it's somehow even more comfortable and familiar than stereotypes are; it's like a gift from an old friend. I don't know of anybody but Morel who can pull off a feat like this with what seems like no effort at all.
REVIEW BY MATT HINRICHS
Our Paradise is a French thriller packed with its fair share of nudity and violence, with a sensitively depicted love story between two men at its core. In contrast to its grisly subject matter (sort of a European gender-reversed version of 2003's Monster), director Gaël Morel guides the film with a wonderful atmosphere and tremendous amount of respect for its characters.
Foremost among the array of complexe, troubled characters in Our Paradise is Vassili (Stéphane Rideau), an aging Parisian hustler who continues to solicit tricks despite his somewhat doughy midsection. Vassili is also plagued with the deepening resentment he harbors towards both his clientele (older, wealthy, often times closeted men) and the ever-younger guys who are angling to take away his livelihood. On the banks of the Seine one night, he comes across an injured teen (Dimitri Durdaine) who had been beaten up by homophobic thugs. After Vassili tends to his wounds and takes him to a doctor friend (a client) for treatment, the younger man opens up to Vassili and becomes his lover. Vassili decides to name the enigmatic man Angelo after the angel tattoo he sports, becoming a mentor and confidant to the devoted younger man.
Our Paradise might count as one of hundreds of tender love stories captured on film, if not for the fact that Vassili has been viciously slaughtering the various men who pay for his services. Vassili takes a sick enjoyment in torturing the men for as long as possible before offing them. While that may make for uncomfortable, terrifying viewing, these scenes are actually filmed with an odd detachment that mirrors Vassili's world view. Vassili's confession horrifies the innocent Angelo, who initially just wants to fleece the johns for their money (shades of Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci in Monster). When a man that Vassili believed was murdered recognizes him in a bar, the two become fugitives desperately in search of a better life.
A lot of what makes Our Paradise enjoyable is its unexpectedness, including the depth of the lead characters, and the frequent but not exploitative use of male nudity (even Vassili's flabby patrons show a lot of skin, adding to the film's emotionless realism). Another surprise occurs about midway through the film, when the scene shifts to another part of France and the household of a rebellious young boy who also goes by the name Vassili (Mathis Morisset). This Vassili lives with his single mom, Anna (Beatrice Dalle of Betty Blue), and his grandmother in the apartment above the bar where Anna works as a waitress and magician's assistant. How these characters tie in with the other Vassili and Angelo is eventually explained, but mostly they're there to establish that even alienated, surly people like Vassili have a network, a lifeline. The humanity of the characters is what sticks here, even as the film reaches an intense yet weirdly abrupt climax.
Although Our Paradise comes wholly recommended, there was something vaguely incomplete about the film that gave me pause, a feeling which was crystallized by my viewing partner after we finished watching it. He observed that there was no real, practical reason for Vassili to be a killer. Which is correct - the film would have been equally satisfying had the character merely been portrayed as a damaged guy with massive grudges against his clients and his lot in life. It's something to ponder while watching this otherwise emotionally resonant, well-crafted film.
Matt Hinrichs is a designer, artist and sometime writer who lives in sunny (and usually too hot) Phoenix, Arizona. Among his loves are oranges, going barefoot and blonde 1930s movie comedienne Joyce Compton. Since 2000, he has been scribbling away at Pop Culture weblog Scrubbles.net. One can also follow him on Twitter @4colorcowboy.
Our Paradise, the other festival movie I saw, has no such hesitancies. Not that this French feature goes all the way to arty pornography, but neither does it feel like it’s leaving such moments incomplete. Given that it’s about rentboys, it certainly should be able to deal with sex with reasonable frankness, which it does; rentboys have to handle clients with some really odd tastes, too, and there’s one scene in Our Paradise that induces such a squirm that it’s actually a relief when it ends in violence.
The lead is Stéphane Rideau, who may be recalled from André Téchiné’s lovely Wild Reeds of 1994, when Rideau was a mere 18. (He was also in François Ozon’s Sitcom, which played at an Out in Africa festival a few years ago, but I seem to have deleted that mental file.) Here he does sterling acting work as Vassili, a sexual gun for hire who has just reached the age of 30 — the age at which, it seems, most rentboys begin to consider retirement if they haven’t already.
Vassili feels decidedly homicidal towards his clients, but when he finds a younger, blonder man (Dimitri Durdaine) who’s been beaten up in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’s cruising park, a whole lot of suppressed love and caring instincts well up in him. We are told zero about this youth’s background, and Vassili discovers zero; he just names him Angelo and takes him home.
A touching interaction between Vassili and Angelo develops, but, as befits people who already have at least one foot in the world of criminality, they are soon on the run. This places Our Paradise squarely in the tradition of À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le Fou, to name just two French on-the-run movies, and it is towards some notional paradise of family, warmth and connection that they are fleeing.
It’s beautifully done, with strong performances all round, but one sees from pretty early on that this movie is in a genre at which the French excel — Beautiful but Depressing. All too easily, paradise becomes inferno.
REVIEW:
Surprising love story, completely free of stereotypes (by jm10701, USA,09/08/2012)
I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I expected to based on other online reviews. There is a good bit of nudity, but not a lot more of Dimitri Durdaine than anybody else, and (in contrast to at least two others, including Stéphane Rideau) none of him that would qualify as "full frontal" - "full side" is more like it, and even those rarely show much except skin. Some other reviews give the impression that he almost never wears clothes and that the camera examines every square inch of his body, neither of which is true at all.
What there IS more of in this movie than most is naked middle-aged and older men, which may bother some people but delights me. Except for Durdaine, all of the naked men in this movie have pot bellies, including Rideau (who's getting comfortably close to middle age himself), which is wonderfully refreshing in an age when only bronzed and hairless gym bodies under 30 ever appear in American gay movies (Can we say BOR-ing?).
Now that nudity's out of the way... There's something I like a lot about Gaël Morel's movies, but I'm not sure what it is. There's something very natural or unpretentious about them, something familiar and almost comforting, regardless of the subject matter. I feel like I'm among friends when I watch his movies. They FEEL good in some mysterious way comparable movies by other directors don't. He has an eye and a style and a language that are quite distinctive but not easy to define; whatever it is, I like it.
Don't let the crime element fool you: Our Paradise is above all else a love story. Vassili (Rideau), a rough, surly, aging hustler who is already in the habit of killing johns who offend him (and many do, since he's getting old and out of shape), finds a kid (Durdaine) beaten unconscious in a cruising park in Paris, takes him home and cares for him. Because the kid looks like an angel and has an angel tattoo in the lower right corner of his abdomen, and since he won't tell his name, Vassili tries "Angel" in various languages; the kid likes Angelo best, so that's who he is from then on. And from then on he is devoted to Vassili. Nothing that happens (and a lot does) shakes his devotion, and that devotion is the heart of this movie.
Angelo is not stupid or a masochist; he doesn't relate to Vassili as slave to master, cub to bear, boy to daddy, or any of the other gay May-December stereotypes. He simply loves Vassili. When Vassili sees that Angelo really does love him and has no desire to find somebody his own age, he relaxes and begins to trust the relationship too. It's lovely. All of their interactions, including several beautiful sex scenes, reinforce the growing strength of their relationship. None of the sex is gratuitous (whatever that means) or forced.
The backdrop for this sweet and tender romance, of course, are Vassili's increasingly rough tricks (since he's no longer young and hot, he has to do kinkier stuff to stay in business), which are depicted in pretty graphic detail, and his habit of killing johns who make wisecracks about his age. Angelo tries to get him to stop the killing, but it becomes obvious he won't, so rather than leave Vassili Angelo stays with him and occasionally helps.
It's really not much different from Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or any of countless other mainstream movies about criminal couples... EXCEPT: this is France, so even the murders are civilized, and (Thank God!) guns never play any part in the movie. (What a relief not once to hear the sound of a gun being fired!) There are no chases, no near escapes, no explosions, none of the noisy, overwrought melodrama that stuffs Hollywood crime movies like fat in a goose's liver. This is a quiet movie, a civilized movie, an intelligent movie. Every murder makes sense because we see them from Vassili's point of view. From the outside he may look like a psychopath, but we see the human being more than the crime; we see a man who is as gentle as a lamb with the (surprisingly many) people he loves and who wipes out the ones who make him unhappy. He's just doing what most of us would LIKE to do.
Even toward the end, when his motives for killing expand, there remains something about everything he does that just feels RIGHT for that character. He does it because he has to. He does it because the ones he kills need to be killed. He has his own moral code, and within that code everything he does is perfectly consistent.
I will emphasize again that Our Paradise is above all a love story, a sweet and surprising love story between a very young man and another nearly twice his age. This movie is about as unconventional as a movie can be - it follows no stereotypes of any genre, and yet it's somehow even more comfortable and familiar than stereotypes are; it's like a gift from an old friend. I don't know of anybody but Morel who can pull off a feat like this with what seems like no effort at all.
REVIEW BY MATT HINRICHS
Our Paradise is a French thriller packed with its fair share of nudity and violence, with a sensitively depicted love story between two men at its core. In contrast to its grisly subject matter (sort of a European gender-reversed version of 2003's Monster), director Gaël Morel guides the film with a wonderful atmosphere and tremendous amount of respect for its characters.
Foremost among the array of complexe, troubled characters in Our Paradise is Vassili (Stéphane Rideau), an aging Parisian hustler who continues to solicit tricks despite his somewhat doughy midsection. Vassili is also plagued with the deepening resentment he harbors towards both his clientele (older, wealthy, often times closeted men) and the ever-younger guys who are angling to take away his livelihood. On the banks of the Seine one night, he comes across an injured teen (Dimitri Durdaine) who had been beaten up by homophobic thugs. After Vassili tends to his wounds and takes him to a doctor friend (a client) for treatment, the younger man opens up to Vassili and becomes his lover. Vassili decides to name the enigmatic man Angelo after the angel tattoo he sports, becoming a mentor and confidant to the devoted younger man.
Our Paradise might count as one of hundreds of tender love stories captured on film, if not for the fact that Vassili has been viciously slaughtering the various men who pay for his services. Vassili takes a sick enjoyment in torturing the men for as long as possible before offing them. While that may make for uncomfortable, terrifying viewing, these scenes are actually filmed with an odd detachment that mirrors Vassili's world view. Vassili's confession horrifies the innocent Angelo, who initially just wants to fleece the johns for their money (shades of Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci in Monster). When a man that Vassili believed was murdered recognizes him in a bar, the two become fugitives desperately in search of a better life.
A lot of what makes Our Paradise enjoyable is its unexpectedness, including the depth of the lead characters, and the frequent but not exploitative use of male nudity (even Vassili's flabby patrons show a lot of skin, adding to the film's emotionless realism). Another surprise occurs about midway through the film, when the scene shifts to another part of France and the household of a rebellious young boy who also goes by the name Vassili (Mathis Morisset). This Vassili lives with his single mom, Anna (Beatrice Dalle of Betty Blue), and his grandmother in the apartment above the bar where Anna works as a waitress and magician's assistant. How these characters tie in with the other Vassili and Angelo is eventually explained, but mostly they're there to establish that even alienated, surly people like Vassili have a network, a lifeline. The humanity of the characters is what sticks here, even as the film reaches an intense yet weirdly abrupt climax.
Although Our Paradise comes wholly recommended, there was something vaguely incomplete about the film that gave me pause, a feeling which was crystallized by my viewing partner after we finished watching it. He observed that there was no real, practical reason for Vassili to be a killer. Which is correct - the film would have been equally satisfying had the character merely been portrayed as a damaged guy with massive grudges against his clients and his lot in life. It's something to ponder while watching this otherwise emotionally resonant, well-crafted film.
Matt Hinrichs is a designer, artist and sometime writer who lives in sunny (and usually too hot) Phoenix, Arizona. Among his loves are oranges, going barefoot and blonde 1930s movie comedienne Joyce Compton. Since 2000, he has been scribbling away at Pop Culture weblog Scrubbles.net. One can also follow him on Twitter @4colorcowboy.
STÉPHANE RIDEAU
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Born: July 25, 1976 (age 38), Agen
Occupation: Actor
Biography:
Stéphane Rideau is a French actor. Although intending to pursue a career in sports, he was discovered in 1992 at a rugby game and then auditioned for a role in the film Les Roseaux sauvages by André Téchiné. He was, at the time, sixteen years old. He later played the role of a gay teenager in Presque rien directed by Sébastien Lifshitz. Rideau has a long acting experience that includes the films Loin, Le Ventre de Juliette, Le Clan and Le Cadeau d'Élena. He currently lives with his partner Celia and their daughter.
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