Our Paradise

Wow, Our Paradise! This movie blew me away from the first frame. One of the best gay movies I've ever seen, its strengths include its indisputable realism. The trolls, the johns, the older men are cast and played to perfection. You forget you're seeing actors who may or may not be gay. As a gay man you might be afraid you are seeing embarrassing bits and pieces of your own life exposed on that screen.

Prepare to be shocked. I've never seen such negative gay themes presented so convincingly. Sort of like a gay version of Natural Born Killers on steroids. Death, dismemberment and destruction as entertainment. Yet you can't take your eyes off the handsome but immoral and psychopathic main characters, the street-trash couple (Stephane Rideau as Vassili, and Dimitri Durdaine as Angelo) who wreak havoc on anyone in their destructive path. Their love is so real, so palpable, that you yearn to see them survive the bloody nightmare, le merde, that is their lives.

I only wish I spoke French, the language of this movie. There are English-language subtitles, but however good the captions are, there is just no way to capture every nuance spoken in such a sophisticated language as French. It's the language that gave us such elegant terms as soixante-neuf, menage-a-trois, frottage, mon choi, voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?, and so many more.

Our Paradise is magnificently filmed on location in Paris and elsewhere across France. You feel as if you were standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I normally don't watch films in a foreign language, but the title fooled me into thinking it was in English (original title: Notre Paradis). One glimpse of the mesmerizing story and I was hooked regardless of language. Available on Netflix.

This is not an easy movie to watch, because of the extremely cynical and negative story. An aging (30 something) hustler hooks up with a mysterious angelic newbie, they develop a love-affair but also continue having payed sex with older men, in the process robbing and even murdering them. Gaël Morel (director and writer) hardly provides any backgrounds, so it's hard to understand their drives and motives (if any). Vassili seems mainly to act on uncontrollable impulses and Angelo, after some initial hesitating, just goes along with it. Sure, we see tenderness between the two, and they also have a warm relation with Vassili's best friend Anna and her little son, but for the rest we get to see two opportunistic, relentless and very unsympathetic persons, which makes it very hard to relate to them.

When in the end justice at last is served, this feels right, but the movie ends so abruptly right there and then, that you are still left unsatisfied: what will happen to them? Is there any remorse? Somehow I missed in this movie urgency, it didn't seem to go anywhere at all, in fact in the end we are left with the same questions as at the start, like: who are these two, why do they do these horrible things?!?

Vassili is played by Stephane Rideau. I saw him recently in "Wild Reeds" ("Les Roseau sauvages") by director Téchiné (in that movie a young Gaël Morel by the way played the leading role), Rideau was only 18 years old back then, and stunningly handsome like a young Alain Delon. But now, at age 35, he looked old, puffy and worn-out. It totally fitted his character, as well as this movie's premise of old versus young, but still I was a bit taken aback by this change. On the other hand: kudos for his courage to not hide anything, but on the contrary, making it instrumental to the movie! Young Dimitri Durdaine is not just cute, but holds himself pretty well and is convincing enough as the somewhat intangible and mysterious love-object. There's a fair amount of sex and nudity, not unusual in Morel's films, and fitting the subject.

A kind of soap or soap-and-splash opera, with well played moments (like at the beginning Jean-Christophe Bouvet flamboyantly enjoying his vinyl record). Maybe engaged by moments of soft porn, the movie doesn't step back to consider its characters, let alone have them think themselves about what they are doing. Since it involves murder, there's a problem. The title may want to suggest that the central characters are Rimbaud and Verlaine, but the artificial paradise here is a pill at bedtime. The younger, Angelo, is there to be dressed or undressed, and gives no indication he knows or doesn't care what his partner is up to. Stéphane Rideau (the elder Vassili), with a hint of gut, can't be an éphèbe anymore, but he seems to know his business as a prostitute and what roles he can now play, so it is very hard to know why he isn't able to deal with older clients. The child, young Vassili (a genetic conundrum the name), does have a better sense of the plights he is in than anyone else.

Even in a relatively free country, approaching prostitution and hedonism within sexual minorities is a challenge, how to remain below porn and above hypocrisy. To a large extent, Notre paradis has managed it under depiction, but at the expense of smooth and well-grounded plot. The viewers get no explanations to several moments happened in the past, and the inclusion of Anna's family splits the script in two in an awkward manner, paving the way for trivial, yet expected ending. The performances, however, are memorable and vigorous, creating a kind of uneasiness and letting you ponder on and over "indecent" matters...

One thing is clear: one must be an open-minded person to watch this film. The visual can be pretty, but the background and apprehensions never are.

It's such a great love story it brings together the pain of how homosexuals have to live but yet you can't feel sorry for they intentionally Go out of their way to hurt people just to survive but they take it to a little bit of an extreme it kind of shows you how during the whole movie it's almost as if you don't feel bad for what they're doing because they make you think it's what they have to do to survive but if we were to see this from a different point of view we would see that what they're doing is wrong and in a criminal act the fact that they're in love kind of makes you feel like what they're doing isn't so bad because they're doing it for love but that is wrong they are killing ceiling just to find happiness little did they know they could find happiness trust within each other and they have but they took what they had for granted and wanted more this is definitely a highly recommended movie I've loved it!