North Sea Texas (2011)

Thanks for the memories!

Load of rubbish!!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

From Belgium comes this coming of age film which is not about Texas. North Sea Texas refers to a local emporium where even juveniles gather to drink whatever. Apparently Belgium has some rather loose drinking laws. It also has some loose laws regarding the age of consent because there's no way a film like this would be made in the USA with such young participants in even tastefully done sex scenes.The two main participants are played by young actors different at different ages. Young Pim who is the only child of the town tramp starts having is gay feelings awakened by a slightly older neighbor boy Gino. Because he finds life so unappealing at his place Pim is over at Gino's a lot. Eventually these teens do the deed and do it over and over.But these are years of exploration and soon enough Gino gets himself a girlfriend leaving an angry Pim the odd man out. Gino's sister likes Pim, but he can't see her at all.How does it all come out? For that you have to see North Sea, Texas. When you do you will a nice coming of age film for gay youth that would be banned in Dixie.

*Spoilers* This film was a random find for me, and I'm so glad that I watched it. It has a very adolescent feel to it, but it is quite a mature film in other parts. The acting was confident and realistic. The shots of the beach and dunes, the rain and sky with the actors' voices panning over really made the film for me. It was a lovely blending of nature and people too. All of the contrasting colours in these shots were perfect. This film reminds me of 'Glue' with the awkward silences and the nervousness of teenagers, also a coming-of-age film which I would highly recommend. I loved the fact that Pim could walk into the house of his neighbours and be like one of the family; it was even more emotional when he was crying when his mother left and also when his 'surrogate' mother got ill and died, I felt the symbolism of all the teenagers' white shirts was very powerful and her gesture with the boys' hands made it a beautiful scene. Overall, a lovely indie film, if a bit long.

The main portion of this film spans at least three years and no ones hair changes. It doesn't get longer, shorter, darker, or lighter. How can an entire cast of a film undergo no superficial changes over a three year period? Did peoples hair not grow in this seaside town? Was their hair growth tied to the slow pace of the story?. The two teen-aged boys had an unbelievable amount of sex. Wow. I didn't do that well in my twenties. And the scene in the hospital with the dying mother and two boys was just bizarre. This plot seems to me to be projection by the film maker. This just doesn't read like an adolescent's life story. And the poor sister. Could someone throw that poor girl a bone? I haven't seen a more sad sack character since Joy Jordan in "Happiness". There's not much else to comment on about this film because not very much happened over the 90 minutes that it took this paint to dry.

Director Bavo Defurne has had a pretty successful career in writing, directing, and producing short films with the kind of active cinematography and intimacy his first feature film North Sea Texas has. Defurne's deep, often unblinking look at his subjects provide us with a truly stark look at their life, and by the end, even if the short was just ten or fifteen minutes long, we achieved an understanding with his characters and his motives became clear. Of course I'm talking about "Campfire," the short he's most regarded for. And let me say, North Sea Texas is no "Campfire." The story concerns a fourteen-year-old named Pim (Jelle Florizoone), who lives in the West Flemish area of France, circa 1970. His father is no longer alive, so his mother Yvette (Eva Van der Gucht) always seems to be in some sort of relationship. A neglected and unnoticed Pim begins to develop feelings for his seventeen-year-old neighbor, Gino (Mathias Vergels), which quickly turn sexual in the wake of Gino moving away with his girlfriend. It just so happens that Pim leaves his mother to live with other relatives and be closer with Gino and his ultimate goal is to try and make their star-crossed relationship work in the long run.Coming-out cinema is beginning to grind not only its own gears together, making for many awkward, too little too late films, but my own personal ones too. Just having gay characters and a gay love story doesn't make a film edgy, exciting, or visceral on its own merits. There needs to be more human interest in the story and, unfortunately, this is greatly lacking here. For starters, there are too many characters. There's no real reason why the mother needed to have a boyfriend in the first place and there's no true reason why Pim had to go live with his relatives anyway. The film could've easily shown him as a neglected boy just because his mother and him were growing distant with each other.Second, the film inhabits the increasingly tedious style of "less-is-more," minimalist filmmaking, which, for this type of story, simply does not work here. It's distracting and makes the film appear inherently vapid of content and story. There are too many scenes of extended periods of silence and too little scenes enriching us with these characters. Long silences can work in film if we're given something to contemplate during the time of the silence. All we're given is a very fragile, loose gay relationship between two young boys, and because of the lack of development we haven't become invested enough to truly care or even worried that something may not work out.But it appears I'm being too hard on a film, whose good intentions are noticeable and somewhat credible. Jelle Florizoone is a fine, subtle screen presence, excelling at a role that is certainly brave for his age, and likewise for Mathias Vergels, whose older character has even a little more to thing about than his lover. Quite possibly the most electric scenes in North Sea Texas are when Pim and Gino are confronting their repressed sexual tendencies in a tent in the woods, which involve many intimate sequences and alive emotion. These scenes alone make the film hard to dislike in many ways.Yet the problems in North Sea Texas are a bit too big to ignore. There's careful directing, beautiful cinematography (if we're comparing it to other works of queer cinema, it's about half as good as the kind we see in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain), and bold performances, but there's also methodical writing, too many characters, slow progression, and an achingly minimalist style present. All I can hope is that one day, the youth of France get a gay movie that could very well represent their culture in a more intricate, sophisticated way.Starring: Jelle Florizoone, Mathias Vergels, Eva van der Gucht, Katelijne Damen, and Noor Ben Taouet. Directed by: Bavo Defurne.