Noce blanche

Was this a joke? Stunning young pupil falls for droopy, haggard old philosophy teacher, becomes obsessed with him, disaster ensues. Imagine "Lolita" with the predatory roles reversed, none of the humor, literacy or irony, and delivered with a sleep-inducing dullness. The "erotic" scenes are laughably soft-core. The film's attempts at a sex/death dialectic are pathetic---you'd do a lot better with Kubrick's Nobokov adaptation, Pabst's "Pandora's Box" or at least "American Beauty", Tragic Jailbait stories with intelligent subtexts.

Vanessa Paradis is transcendental. She enlivens the film, even if her character is written in a cheap, tawdry and uninteresting note. The sight of Cremer slobbering over Paradis' silky young skin gave me the shivers, almost as much as watching Harvey Fierstein making out with Matthew Broderick in "Torch Song Trilogy": anything to skip this Creepy Old Guy fantasy that doesn't show any awareness of its own ludicrous hamfisted-ness.

Double Ewwwwwwww...