Keller - Teenage Wasteland

This ca 1,5 hour film starts off well, but then, after a certain event related to a checker called Sonja, the power decreases and the scenes become protracted at times, the characters "run aground", even if their development is visible... There are some twists coming, but together with some clichés, paving the way for predictable ending (fortunately, created with versatile accomplishment). As for performances, they are good: Elisabetta Rocchetti as Sonja Ludwig Trepte as Paul, and particularly Sergej Moya as Sebastian. It is the performances that make the film more or less watchable, although there are dozens of stronger youth films available, including from Germany.

Well, on the other hand, I acknowledge that I do not belong to the target audience of the film.

I'll admit that this is a dark and twisted film, and difficult to watch at times. However, I feel people are missing the whole point, and mistakenly judging it for its content, rather than its message.

Sure, the film features some truly ugly deeds and events, but that's all necessary to convey the hopelessness and abandonment experienced by too many young boys going through the sort of things these two are dealing with.

At least one of the boys is gay, and is struggling with his unrequited feelings for the other boy. That is literally tearing him apart inside, and drives him to become callous and dead inside. As a matter of fact, this film has one of the most powerful scenes of gay suffering I've ever witnessed in film. That scene alone was so well-done, and it deserves praise.

The message is about how homophobia is so toxic, and destroys gay people inside. The whole film is like a fever dream. In fact, it's that dream-like quality which feels so nostalgic to me. I have to admit, I used to dream these sorts of things when I was a closeted youth. This is exactly the sort of hopeless despair I experienced. Very few other films have ever portrayed that experience better.

To me, this message is important. I think people don't really understand how difficult being gay can actually be, and this film presents how internally destructive homophobia is. That may be difficult to accept, but it's no less true, and I think everybody needs to know it.

I guess, very few people will ever understand the internal struggle the two are going through. The film is no celebration, but a warning. Not everybody will accept that dark reminder, but I think it's important, nonetheless.

How does a movie like this even get made, when there are dozens of extremely talented directors who can't make movies because there's no money? Regardless of how little it cost to make this one, it was too much.

The two kids are very good actors, but their characters are the most obnoxious thugs I've seen in ages and should have been killed off early. But then we would have been left alone with the duck-lipped Italian woman and her gross, greasy German boyfriend, and God knows: NOBODY deserves such a fate.

Watching this movie is torture! I felt like I was tied in that chair with Duckwoman for 95 minutes. The ONLY interesting thing about this movie is that her armpit hair didn't grow even a millimeter during her days of captivity. Now, does that sound like a movie worth watching?

This flawed but interesting movie is about two teenage German boys who attend the same private school, but are from very different social classes. They embark on a decidedly homoerotic friendship with the wealthier but less bisexual of the two becoming the dominant partner. When the rich boy is insulted by a female liquor store clerk (Elizabetta Rochetti) after she catches him shop-lifting, the pair impulsively decide to abduct her and hold her captive in an abandoned warehouse owned by the rich kid's father. But their seemingly helpless victim finds a way to drive a wedge between her two volatile adolescent captors. . .

This story is quite believable in the bi-curious relationship between the two adolescents (even if both actors look a little long in the tooth for these roles). The class dynamic is also very interesting. I didn't quite buy the psychological resourcefulness of the woman, however, but I would blame in on the character on the page rather than the actress. Elizabetta Rochetti was memorable as the sexy blonde in Dario Argento's "Do You Like Hitchcock?", but she's done other things like this and "The Embalmer. She goes through a lot of acting paces in this film (even if it's not very believable a single character WOULD go through all these paces). She gets kidnapped after some unsatisfying sex with her boyfriend sends her down to the laundry room to, uh, finish the job in a sexy masturbation scene. Then she's a believable victim who suffers a great deal of humiliation from her sexually confused captors. And finally she's a sexy femme fatale who turns the table.

This movie kind of reminded me of the recent British film "The Disappearance of Alice Creed" (with Gemma Aterton in the Rochetti role). This movie makes the bisexual/gay male captors confused adolescents, and functions better as a "coming-of-age" film, but that film was more generally believable. Both are certainly worth seeing though

This is a disturbing and powerful first film from a woman director who did no other films before that and went to no film school. You can't tell from the film. It looks like the work of an experienced professional who knows exactly how to direct the cast and use the language of film to get the desired effects. Two teenage boys meet and strike up a friendship in a short time. They are caught stealing in a supermarket by an employee, a young woman. They are thrown out by her. They follow her home... In no time the boys and we, the audience, enter another world as Jeffrey does in "Blue Velvet". A disturbing world of the human mind where the lines between victim and perpetrator, right and wrong, the normal and the abnormal start to dissolve. The film is deeply disturbing because it goes to extremes, but stays believable, even plausible till the end. The cast is excellent throughout. No doubt this film will be controversial which might cost it the main prize here at Locarno. But on day one we have already seen what might be the most important film in the competition this year.