Adoration

A very well-written story (three screenwriters), in which a teenager, Thomas Gioria, who lives in autarky with his mother, works in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets a new resident, Fantine Harduin, who turns his life upside down. She will provoke the adoration of the title: he is fascinated by this young girl.

Fabrice du Welz brilliantly composes atmospheric sequences, at times suspended in mid-air, with very rough and violent scenes, interspersed throughout a journey undertaken by our two lovers. Most of their journey takes place on the water, during which they meet a variety of characters. Their final encounter is decisive for the rest of the story. Among the people they meet is a character played by Benoit Poelvoorde, who makes a short but powerful and memorable appearance, also in suspension and on edge.

A beautiful film and a curiosity.

It looks nice. But it's the same tone from beginning to end, so becomes visually boring very quickly.

The acting is just ok - incredibly earnest with lots of 'emoting' going on to fill the vast distances between plot points or intrigue.

The story is a fairly typical young love drama. Our boy is inexperienced and because of this, he devotes himself to 'rescuing' our girl who is, like, totally crazy man. She's like, totally in an institution and the bad doctors give her sedatives and stuff. And then she y'know, like, says crazy things. She's like sooo crazy.

The writing of her character is unforgiveably weak. The boy slackens his jaw and gawps at her for most of the runtime. The film plods along predictably until it stubs its toe on the ending, which is neither tragic enough nor dramatic enough to matter. In fact, the ending is where the story should have begun. Everything up until that point could have been covered in two minutes.

Tedious, thematically transparent, metaphorically barren and in love with itself. Guff.

12-year old Paul falls in love for the first time, unfortunately with a violent, abusive and dangerously insane patient from his nurse mother's psychiatric ward. They run off together and tragic events ensue.

This came out of nowhere for me - I'd never heard of it before today and there seems very little written about it online. It's a very tightly made character piece, small in scale but beautifully shot and observed. The two teen leads are faultless and utterly believable at every turn, and we feel both great tenderness and sorrow for Paul's big, bewildered and tragically open heart doing everything he can to follow the logic of Fantine Harduin's chillingly mad (as in "Kill the chicken it is a spy for my uncle" mad) Gloria.

It's a film about trying to save someone who can't be saved, and trying to believe in someone who can't possibly be believed, and the harm to all around that inevitably follows when a well-meaning boy refuses to recognize the monster beside him who he only wants to worship. It can appear a very small story but Adoration tells it very well and much is communicated about the heavy cost of rose-tinted spectacles.

If it has a weakness, I guess maybe it ends a little anticlimacticly, but I also quite like just floating off and leaving them in this way, thinking about Hinkel's soul and the birds. It's enough.

As a doomed young Romeo and Juliet story, it's not in the same class as, say, Let The Right One In, Badlands, Bonnie & Clyde or Harold & Maude, but it put me in mind of all of them a little, and it does occasionally feel like "they don't make 'em like this anymore"

7.5

P.S., the repeating post credits scene - if it is not just a glitch on my copy - seems a puzzling waste of time.

A young boy whose mother works at a nearby asylum comes across a girl recently admitted. He sees her a few times, only to be scolded. Yet tells why she's there is so her family can get a large inheritance she has been left with. The boy aids her escape. And in doing so, cause an accidental death, becoming fugitives. Evading capture, they come by kind strangers, and the boy sees the girl is not mentally sound as he thought. Yet affection keeps him trapped. So not quite as mysterious and horrific as the Swedish classic 'Let The Right One In', this film somewhat follows in it's footsteps. Hard not to feel pity for both the young characters, even as the girl unravels on the poor boy. Especially when they come across kind and unwitting strangers. Unlike Let The Right One In, where I felt a kind of joy that the two would continue on, and he would help her survive. Adoration really left me sad, knowing that the two couldn't go on much longer. But is clever in that it doesn't give full closure. Maybe becoming the next Mickey and Mallory of Natural Born Killers. Or to be soon caught, charged and separated? And the two seem fully aware of either. A strange but sweet coming of age story. And a realistic look at some serious mental illness far beyond Bennie & Joon.

This is what cinema is supposed to be like. Flawless acting, transcending imagery, touching story, shockingly human. All-in-all, so hauntingly beautiful.

Thank you!

Merci!

Bedankt!