Stupid Boy (2004)

Thanks for the memories!

Beautiful, moving film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This film begins with an intriguing central character - a beautiful young Swiss gay man who lives with in a sexless relationship with a slightly older woman but divides his time between promiscuous sexual encounters with the (not always young or attractive) men he meets on the internet, and working a boring day job on a production line in a chocolate factory - and has an excellent sense of visual storytelling to hook you into his tale. Yet pretty soon, I realised that pretty Loic was being set up by the film maker as not merely a portrait of a working class gay boy making his chaotic way through contemporary consumer society, but as a moral lesson for the audience, in which they learn that (yawn) anonymous sexual encounters aren't the answer, it's bad to be selfish and celebrities (he's stalking a sexy, second-rate footballer) aren't what they're cracked up to be. As the title suggests, the film takes a moral angle on the "stupid boy" at its centre, and so the promise of being dropped into a genuine 21st century life without editorialising comes to nothing.The film never really tackles why Loic gets so hung up by his own sexual waywardness and then projects his guilt onto others, as when he calls his girl friend a "slut" for sleeping with her boyfriend. There's something going on here about social pressures and normalising sexualities, but the film is so content on putting its hero through a pretty run-of-the-mill rites of passage story that it doesn't really take note of the class-ridden, banally consumerist world around him. A number of the plot devices - the accidental death of the girl friend, the "dream" meeting with the footballer in the Alps - are rather laboured, although worst of all is the unseen director surrogate (called, like the film's auteur, Lionel) who meets with Loic to question him and instruct him that "men can be interested in you without wanting to have sex with you." Which is pretty dishonest of Lionel, having sold the film as a portrait of a young kid who is pictured stripped on the publicity material and who he knows the target demographic will want to shag rotten.In the final act, Loic spends all his money on an expensive digital camera, announces that he rejects all of the roles (insider or outsider) that society has to offer him, asserts that he will "tell my own stories" and promptly meets the boy of his dreams in a fairground. Frankly, this is sentimental, glib and philosophically naive. Loic will have to choose to inhabit at least some of the roles which he so stridently rejects, although I suppose that the voice over which announces all of this might be a satire on his naivety, but it isn't played that way.Garçon stupide would have been better off not indulging in the jejune moralising which tries to make it a heard-it-all-before moral lesson rather than a truly impressionistic portrait; it betrays its lead character by ticking him off, rather than showing him deepening himself in an existential problem to which there is no glib solution, no matter that bourgeois gay filmmakers and their DVD collecting consumers might desire one.

Though most reviewers and viewers are putting this film down as a waste of time, this particular viewer sees many redeeming factors here that, given some further time in the editing room and a bit of script doctoring, could have resulted in a moving story.Young Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier has both written (with Laurent Guido) and directed with quasi-autobiographical story that explores the coming of age of a lower class young lad who seems destined to settle for being a hustler. Loic (first time actor Pierre Chatagny) works in an assembly line chocolate factory in Bulle, Switzerland and his only 'life' is provided through his internet activity meeting men for sex. His casual sexual encounters (rather graphically shown in the first portion of the film) are his only answer to relating to people until he meets Marie (Natacha Koutchoumov) with whom he rooms and bonds. Marie is bright and encourages Loic, uneducated and uninformed, to look up words he encounters- a simple but well-intended manner in which Loic can improve himself. He meets the older Lionel (played by the director Lionel Baier) who dangles before Loic's eyes the possibilities of finer things in life. Loic spends his idle hours with a digital camera and between his new interest in photography and his pursuing his 'basic' education, he begins to long for a life more significant than his brainless casual sex. He becomes friends with a soccer player and his son, loses his friendship with Marie when Marie finds a real lover, and ultimately Loic yearns to escape the life of the 'stupid boy' of the title and enters a dreamworld fantasy of something better.Good ideas for a film here, but Baier seems to get sidetracked into artsy camera work, quasi-porno, and surrealistic moving lights and alpine scenery, and the film falters as a result. But there does seem to be some promise of a new filmmaker on the rise, This film may not be tolerated by some for various reasons, but for the adventurous spirits who are unafraid of a bit of male frontal nudity and sexual acting out, here are redeeming aspects to this little film that merit attention. Grady Harp

Whatever the merits of this film, and there are several, I find it most irritating that so much of it is filmed in close-up. It is like reading a text all in caps, with all sentences closed by an exclamation mark. At some point I got a headache. This is an relatively common fault with many indies regardless where they originate. Close-ups are used to highlight.... Use too much of it and it becomes tedious and levels the visual narrative.Otherwise, there are promising signs. There is an amiability to the project that makes one feel churlish in criticizing it. Particularly moving is the scene between Loïc and the soccer player. The most perceptive lines in the whole film are given to the soccer player. Perhaps one ought to suspend disbelief, enjoy happy-ends, and wish Mr. Baier, his actors and crew, good luck with their next endeavor..... and of course, that they place greater trust in longer distances between lens and object.

A very sexy, natural and stylish film about a "normal live" of a young men... compliments to to director and the actors! so complicated and funny is life today in modern Europe.But it is not astounding that the most refreshing film with topic of homosexuality comes from Switzerland.This country shows in deed an astoundingly positive tolerance an "bienveillance" in front of the gay &lesbian community, how was showed by the acceptance of homo-"marriage" by the peoples-referendum in spring 2005.It is to hope, that such films can increase tolerance also in other countries, like USA, which are far more behind the development in Europe.So: look this film a make an opinion. Tolerance is alway a virtue.