Mauvaises fréquentations

As a filmmaker the stunning cinematography, direction and a great soundtrack that includes the brilliant Lene Marlin track Where I'm Headed, Mauvais Frequentations seemed to be grip me. Although the DVD I own has no subtitles and I understand very little French, I was mesmerised by the way the film flowed and unfolded before me. The actors suited there roles superbly, adding to the unsuspecting dramatic script.

Mauvais Frequentations portrays how people can be exploited and how situations can get totally out of hand, movies like this should be made more often. 'Fluffy bunny' cinema is great but has no meaning, at the end of a film one should be able to contemplate upon the scenes you have seen in the movie If someone is into alternative cinema, Mauvais Frequentations might be just the thing to get engrossed in one cold night.

This movie is great, theres only one sex scene in it but its so shocking to see stuff not allowed on the states and Mexico as well for a softcore scene with a minor,I liked the movie because it talks about growing up in an enviroment that can take you places you really dont want to be part of,This is not the classical story girl meets boy and boy gets girl, this is more like: Girl meets boy, boy likes girl, boy pimps that girl..etc. shocking stuff happens and lives change forever in this great tale about love and blows, youll like it too.

I like French movies a lot, and I like racy content however, this movie is silly. Reality check: If Laurent was a destitute heroin junkie badly in need of a fix and Delphine was an abused run-away with no family to turn to for help, I might have had some chance of accepting this movie's plot. There are so many other better French movies out there, try Jean-Luc Godard instead of this.

The French have strong tradition of literature and classy art films (even though they have also made as much crap as anyone else). However, I don't know if it's the influence of television, but last 10 or 15 years or so they have started making more and more films like this about "social problems"--that almost look like they could have appeared on the Lifetime channel in the US (at least if you took out all the nudity). Don't get me wrong this is a lot better than a Lifetime movie (thus the high IMDb rating and generally positive reviews), but like a lot of other recent French movies I've seen such as "Alive", "Student Services", and "Elles", it seems more interested in sending a "social message"--in this case about teen prostitution--than it is in being a coming-of-age film about a singular female character (the kind of film Catherine Breillat has really specialized in with films like "36 Fillette" and "To My Sister"). I obviously prefer the latter.

This is the story of two naïve teenage girls (Maud Forget and Lou Doillon)who are manipulated by their boyfriends into becoming prostitutes (performing oral sex on lines of guys in the bathroom stalls of local parks) in order to finance a trip to Latin America. This is all a little less than believable, not because such things don't happen in real life, but because of the actresses involved. Maud Forget is just really, really cute, but Lou Doillon (the daughter of British beauty Jane Birkin) despite her "unconventional" facial features, looks like a tall, teenage supermodel, which is basically what she was at the time. Just about any teenage boy in real-life would probably be very intimidated by girls like these, and not be manipulating them into low-rent prostitution. (Now, if they were being preyed on by older adult "modeling agents", I could see it). I'm always generally suspicious about movies where teenage girls are naïve and innocent, yet the boys about the same age seem overly clever and evil. It just doesn't ring true.

Maud Forget is really good in this, despite being only about 16 or 17 herself at the time, and to the extent this movie works, it is because of her. Doillon has had much more of her subsequent career, possibly because of her family connections (her father is a director and her half-sister is Charlotte Gainsbourg), but she is miscast and not particularly effective here. She can play "ugly" as she did in "Saint Ange" or a man-eating sex bomb as did in "Sisters" and "Summer Things", but she just doesn't do "ordinary" very well. This might be worth seeing, but I didn't like it as much as a lot of other people did.

I for one one know how to say anything in French other that "yes","yes sir","excuse me" and other sorted words/comments which wouldn't get me out of the French airport; but there's something about this movie as all good foreign films that made me fluent in the French language I was immediately wrapped up in the world of these two girls who fall for their boyfriends but despite the fact that their plan to leave all together comes down to the girls degrading themselves into the world of prostitution where the are subsequently seen as outcasts by their friends and classmates and seen as no more then whores by the boys who "use their services" the girls learn the hard way that not everything is the way it seems. In the end I feel sad for the loss of true love due to the circumstances by way of the only boy which really did love her in his own naive way but could not get the same love back from a girl who's hart was stolen by someone else who in the end would betray her trust. In the world we live in now growing pains are much more common by the ways perfectly portrayed in this film and in this ever changing world we could all learn something from the mistakes of these two girls but never the less this kind of life story is one better experienced personally.