Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) | Little White Lies

Bang Gang (A Mod­ern Love Story)

17 Jun 2016 / Released: 10 Jun 2016

Close-up of 2 faces silhouetted against a bright light source, casting dramatic shadows.
Close-up of 2 faces silhouetted against a bright light source, casting dramatic shadows.
3

Anticipation.

First feature, provocative subject. A French teen-movie grown from American roots.

3

Enjoyment.

Enough points of view are described to let you decide where to stand, morally.

2

In Retrospect.

A bit too superficial in its conclusions on modern adolescence to be remembered.

Hot sex and cold moral­is­ing come togeth­er in this strange exam­i­na­tion of how French teens spend their downtime.

This first fea­ture by French direc­tor Eva Hus­son attempts to offer an insider’s view of mod­ern ado­les­cence. And it part­ly suc­ceeds for its first two acts. As term time ticks down to its final min­utes, la sai­son des amours begins for a bunch of hopped-up high school stu­dents. Bored by the their mid­dle class res­i­den­tial sub­urb, which is sit­u­at­ed on the coast of South-west­ern France, they start col­lect­ing one-night stands with one anoth­er. Mat­ters notch up a lev­el when George (Mar­i­lyn Lima) adapts the rules of the tra­di­tion­al par­ty game Spin the Bot­tle to get one of the boys’ atten­tion, trans­form­ing inno­cent frol­ics into a giant teens-only gang bang.

There’s social pres­sure to enter the game, but con­sent is not the issue here, nor is the lack of con­fi­dence typ­i­cal for ado­les­cents. The dia­logue employs lots of mod­ern slang which shows Husson’s desire to metic­u­lous­ly describe – with­out judg­ing – a gen­er­a­tion brought up with inter­net porn and dat­ing apps. It results in a nice­ly sus­tained bal­ance: char­ac­ters are too beau­ti­ful to be authen­tic, but still cred­i­ble in their exces­sive sex­u­al desires.

But is it enough just to keep up with these kids until their sto­ry reach­es its cli­max and enters into a moral­is­tic down­ward spi­ral? Visu­al­ly speak­ing, the film direct­ly quotes its influ­ences: Sofia Coppola’s sense of empa­thy but with­out the style, and Lar­ry Clark’s ele­gant­ly wast­ed youths, but with­out the extreme provo­ca­tion. But there are also some inter­est­ing and gen­uine ideas, like the way Hus­son mul­ti­plies our points of view by mix­ing between the musi­cal sound­track and the actors’ heavy breath­ing, as well as alter­nat­ing between short, arti­fi­cial­ly staged sequences and longer takes that are more dia­logue driven.

Visu­al­ly, there’s an ambiva­lence towards the sub­jects, like they’re spec­i­mens more than real peo­ple. French cul­ture mag Les Inrock­upt­ibles’ tried to whip the film up as a big bang” for French teen movies on a more inter­na­tion­al scale, but in this case, the new stu­dent hasn’t sur­passed the Amer­i­can mas­ters of the genre.

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