You should be warned that 'Les Amants Criminels' is not an easy viewing, despite being a French movie with almost one decade of age. What can impress viewers after the various 'Saw' or 'Hostel' installments you may ask? It is not indeed in the graphical details that lie both the attraction and rejection that this film can cause. It is more in the surprising combination.
'Les Amants Criminels' is sort of a meeting between fairy tales and horror, between 'Texas Chainsaw' and 'Bambi' in a setting that reminds 'Blair Witch Project'. It also resembles Larry Clark's 'Bully' as the heroes are teenagers planning and executing the murder of a colleague of theirs, with the huge difference that director's Francois Ozon's heroes seem completely clueless and lack any kind of moral sense. If we can understand that teenagers lack social awareness, and that their instincts and search of auto-discovery prevails on the connection with the real world, yet we seldom or never have met a couple lacking any awareness about suffering excepting their own. Behind their angelic and sexy appearances the two heroes (very well acted by Natacha Regnier and Jeremie Renier) are cold blood murderers who kill and are horribly punished by a series of atrocities up to the size of their deeds. Their behavior defies logic, their feelings seem to be permanently wrongly channeled, and even their tentative of redemption through love filmed in an idealist and ironical manner is cut off abruptly by tragedy as the real world hits back with the power of a hurricane on those who have broken its laws.
Did the director who also co-authored the script intent to make any moral statement here? I doubt, as the final scenes presents the main hero back into his convoluted logic giving forgiveness to his evil tormentor, whom according to what happened on screen we cannot consider but a tool of punishment and source of horror in the story. And yet the film does have a magnetism of its own, and the story as incredible as it may be is very well told. At the end of the film I did not get any better understanding of the characters, as their motivation seems to be impossible to explain or understand. I did enjoy however the exquisite cinematography, and liked the coherent logic of the absurd behavior of the characters who do not cease to surprise on the wrong side of our normal judgment, all over the film.
'Les Amants Criminels' is sort of a meeting between fairy tales and horror, between 'Texas Chainsaw' and 'Bambi' in a setting that reminds 'Blair Witch Project'. It also resembles Larry Clark's 'Bully' as the heroes are teenagers planning and executing the murder of a colleague of theirs, with the huge difference that director's Francois Ozon's heroes seem completely clueless and lack any kind of moral sense. If we can understand that teenagers lack social awareness, and that their instincts and search of auto-discovery prevails on the connection with the real world, yet we seldom or never have met a couple lacking any awareness about suffering excepting their own. Behind their angelic and sexy appearances the two heroes (very well acted by Natacha Regnier and Jeremie Renier) are cold blood murderers who kill and are horribly punished by a series of atrocities up to the size of their deeds. Their behavior defies logic, their feelings seem to be permanently wrongly channeled, and even their tentative of redemption through love filmed in an idealist and ironical manner is cut off abruptly by tragedy as the real world hits back with the power of a hurricane on those who have broken its laws.
Did the director who also co-authored the script intent to make any moral statement here? I doubt, as the final scenes presents the main hero back into his convoluted logic giving forgiveness to his evil tormentor, whom according to what happened on screen we cannot consider but a tool of punishment and source of horror in the story. And yet the film does have a magnetism of its own, and the story as incredible as it may be is very well told. At the end of the film I did not get any better understanding of the characters, as their motivation seems to be impossible to explain or understand. I did enjoy however the exquisite cinematography, and liked the coherent logic of the absurd behavior of the characters who do not cease to surprise on the wrong side of our normal judgment, all over the film.