Some critics have said about this disaster of a film that it somehow echoes Claire Deni's 'Beau travail' or Fassbinder's 'Querelle' for what affects the way of filming male bodies/male colonies: I would rather say that Mr Morel attempts to plagiarize them and is very, very far from mastering the same art as them; I would even add that in some scenes, he even (unsucsessfully) tries to plagiarize Pasolini.Now, let's come to the plot: contrarily to his co-writer, Christophe Honoré, whose film 'Ma mère', no matter how unpleasant it may be to some people, knows exactly what it is about,'Le clan' is a huge mess that claims to explore the aspects of an all-male colony, and , as the director so kindly expresses it, the human male in its vulnerability, but fails at every level. First of all, almost all of his characters are formatted: same look, same shaved heads, same deliberately unclear sexual behaviour: it is as all of them have repressed homo-erotic fantasies, but at the same time display the most caricatural straight macho behaviour: take for instance, the scene when they're watching a pornographic film together, and in the adjacent room, there is a transvestite!!! (if they are so male, why not pay a female prostitute?) waiting to be f***** by all of them. Another example of total absurdity is when one of the brothers wants to avenge himself from drug dealers by provoking a hit-and-run car accident, and deliberately later crashes his car on a tree: another complete inconsistency; there are many others, such as for instance, the 3 brothers sleeping nude together with their father watching them with an appalled glance (are all young men supposed to be incestuous???!!!) Not to mention this bastard of youngest brother who uses the Arab boy (the only consistent character in the film) to make him lose his virginity and then dumps him for no apparent reason and continues to have sex with his flying instructor. And with all of this, are we supposed to have understanding/compassion for a bunch of degenerate characters? No, I do not buy it, and, being a male myself, I would NEVER IN MY LIFE identify myself with these repulsive boys, who no way, in my opinion, represent a coherent portrait of today's young men.
Review of Three Dancing Slaves
