Mek­toub, My Love: Can­to Uno

Cut! Move on. Hur­ry the hell up. Get a shift on. Holds up wrist, taps watch with a look of stark bewil­der­ment. Can we please get this train mov­ing? We have some patience-both­er­ing on a Olympic lev­el here with Abdel­latif Kechiche’s bil­low­ing slab of sun-blissed wind­bag­gery, Mek­toub, My Love: Can­to Uno, a some­what belat­ed fol­low-up to his 2013 Palme d’Or-winner, Blue is the Warmest Colour.

He is a writer-direc­tor who is known for tak­ing his good sweet time with things. He builds up char­ac­ters, del­i­cate­ly cul­ti­vates plot-strands, flesh­es out micro dra­mas and whips them to the point of bliss­ful hys­te­ria. Cre­ative part­ners have con­stant­ly afford­ed him the gift of extend­ed run­times for his work, per­haps denot­ing the sense of earth-shat­ter­ing grav­i­tas to which his sto­ries so often convey.

He is empow­ered to indulge. And indulge he has. Mek­toub feels like a sick per­son­al dare, or a stealthy broad­side pre-aimed at neg­a­tive crit­i­cism, where­by Kechiche has attempt­ed to string out what feels like a short film’s worth of mate­r­i­al to near­ly three, excru­ci­at­ing­ly banal hours. It’s a malev­o­lent act of art film trolling.

It’s not that the char­ac­ters are dull, the per­for­mances weak, or the set­ting unin­ter­est­ing, but that Kechiche insists on a mil­i­tant­ly non-inter­ven­tion­ist stance where­by there’s no trace that he is shap­ing a sto­ry or con­triv­ing a sit­u­a­tion that tac­it­ly con­nects one scene to the next. If there is some sub­tle under­pin­ning or con­nec­tive tis­sue which makes the mate­r­i­al feel even vague­ly coher­ent or sat­is­fy­ing, then this view­er most cer­tain­ly missed it. It’s not inco­her­ent so much as it is incontinent.

Maybe it’s an attempt to build a bound­less, bor­der­less sur­re­al epic from the build­ing blocks of hard-edged real­ism? Maybe it’s an attempt to cre­ate a work of behav­iour­al ethnog­ra­phy where we can care­free French twen­tysome­things in their nat­ur­al habi­tat? What­ev­er it is, the results are eye-water­ing­ly dull, if not for­mal­ly intrigu­ing. It comes as a shock to dis­cov­er that this was actu­al­ly inspired by the 2012 nov­el ​‘La Blessure, la Vraie’ by François Bégaudeau (writer and star of Lau­rent Cantet’s 2008 film The Class), as it presents itself as some­thing clos­er to free­wheel­ing documentary.

Shaïn Boume­dine plays Amin, a self-appoint­ed cere­bral over­seer and sen­si­tive soul who spends the entire film with a shit-eat­ing grin plas­tered across his face while he nods along and refus­es to say any­thing of inter­est to the var­i­ous peo­ple (most­ly scant­i­ly clad women) with whom he comes into con­tact. More excit­ing is Ophélie (Ophélie Bau), a care­free and dis­arm­ing­ly unself­con­scious old pal he recon­nects with short­ly after wit­ness­ing her in the midst of a sweaty sex­u­al bunk-up with Amin’s cousin Tony (Sal­im Kechiouche).

Amin is down in the south­ern beach town of Sète hav­ing dropped out of med­ical school. He hangs out in the Tunisian com­mu­ni­ty with his fam­i­ly, doss­ing on the beach, neck­ing shots in in the club, watch­ing his wolfish pals grind up against any female flesh that will allow it, tak­ing a few pho­tos of farm ani­mals, and that’s pret­ty much the size of it. Kechiche doesn’t even real­ly com­mit to sug­gest­ing that he’s the main char­ac­ter, as he so often sinks into the backdrop.

As with Blue is the Warmest Colour, Kechiche’s cam­era snakes and slith­ers up and down the bod­ies of his female cast mem­bers. The direc­tor, unwit­ting­ly or oth­er­wise, char­ac­teris­es him­self as a randy voyeur – the type of per­son who would head to a nud­ist beach, alone, armed with a spy cam­era, but claim to be on some high­er intel­lec­tu­al mis­sion. The occa­sion­al use of clas­si­cal music might make us believe that he is con­nect­ing his lithe sub­jects to the rip­pling, denud­ed stat­ues of antiq­ui­ty, but after the 20^th time the cam­era dips below the equa­tor to get a good eye­ful of Bau’s ass, you feel the the­o­ry doesn’t have legs.

So it’s a big old bomb, then. But the strangest news is that this is the pro­posed first part in a tril­o­gy of films. If Kechiche does decide he wants to fol­low through on this exer­cise in audi­ence alien­ation (please! No more club­bing sequences! Make it stop!), let’s all cross fin­gers, toes and every­thing else that he’s giv­en some stricter bound­aries the next time around.