Three Dancing Slaves (2005)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I feel like we are living in a throwback time. Fashions are retro, heroes are bad guys, bad guys are psychopaths. Didn't we do this in the 1930s? I'm really over seeing the tortured lives of young men with too much testosterone. This movie is like macho masturbation. The men are all babies. They are not evolved human beings. If this movie represents where humanity is going, I'm glad there is global warming! Like rabid dogs, these guys just act on animal instinct making wrong choices all the time. The most touching scene, where the one tough guy has to toss his dog over the raving, would've have been much better if he'd jumped. The producers of this movie must have nothing better to do than scan the daily news for shock and repulsion. I hope nobody gives them any more money to produce such crap. Better yet guys, why don't all the people who made this movie jump over the ravine.

This is a beautifully made film. The acting and production values are superb. I think the reason that some reviewers have difficulty with this film is just that it's a very simple film...It's about three young men dealing with the loss of their mother, and a father who has lost his wife. Each brother finds his own way to deal with his loss; one through drug abuse and self injury, one becomes his father, and another discovers the courage to express his desires. Morel allows the characters to breathe, and respects us enough to expect us to pay attention to visual clues which are equally important as spoken dialog, without spelling out all the details. Morel is masterful at depicting the emotional tone between individuals and groups. For instance, the scene in which Christophe has just come home from prison is extremely complex. There's a great deal of homo-erotic nuance between the brothers and their friends in this scene. While Morel creates a space for it, and fully inhabits it, he never feels a need to make a point of it, to make a statement. There's simply no need for that. It's not that they are gay or straight, but precisely that the lines between gay and straight are rather fuzzy between these good friends. Putting that message into words would create a self conscious tone in the film which could destroy the dense fabric of emotional ambiguity in which the brothers live. It may well be that part of the brothers emotional problems have to do with the intensity of their feelings for each other, and their fear of expressing them, as well. All three have shortcomings, and none find a way to fully escape the trauma that defines their family. In the end, the ironic point is that the slave dancer is free enough to take a principled, self respecting stand to end a demeaning relationship, yet the three brothers who look down on him are enslaved to their past.The plot(and there is one) is entirely subservient to the emotional issues of the characters. If you're looking for a plot driven movie, this film has a plot, but the issues that drive the plot are almost entirely internal. This is a film not primarily about events, but how people respond to events and the ways in which their responses shape their lives. Viewed from that perspective, this is a unique and powerful film.

For the originality of its content and manner of telling, Gael Morel's "Le Clan" deserves wide art-house distribution. It does, however, need a better English title. Life may be difficult for people in the film, but they are not slaves and make choices that attempt to better their situations, if not always happily. Why not simply "A Clan," since nobody remembers Griffith's second title for "Birth of a Nation," or "Brothers"? Two boys practice a North African "slave dance," but for sport and release.The tightly edited movie can be thought of as short stories about three brothers and their father. With rapid shifts we keep learning new things about the characters. Sometimes one wonders what went on during a gap, but usually one can figure it out and the dialogue that would have worked it through would have been sentimental and out of character.One shot of the brothers huddled together watched by their father is difficult to justify realistically, but it works as a symbolic representation. If meanwhile one wants everything spelled out and sweetened, there is the Québec film "C.R.A.Z.Y." The brothers do maintain enormous familiarity. The youngest one, very drunk, is helped by a brother to vomit.If that's shocking, we have to take it as a fact of the milieu. The banlieux of France have recently been in the news. "Le Clan" goes much further with stories that lead one to care for the characters in the variety of their difficult situations of social derogation, dangerous labour, sexuality, and self-esteem.

While several friends loved it, I didn't care for this film. One can strive to find redemption in the way the 3 brothers cared for one another in this amazingly dysfunctional family, but it doesn't make up for the gratuitous violence and brutal portrayal of the killing of a dog.This film seems mostly about pushing the edges of the shock envelope with frontal nudity (shaving and pub trimming included) psychological and physical brutality taking center stage. For some, this kind of non-Hollywood shock therapy is apparently enjoyable. For me it was an unfortunate way to spend one and one half hours.Many people walked out during the screening I attended, and many more complained about the inclusion of this film in the local film festival as unnecessary. If hitting a painful nerve is the intent, this film does that well.