User Reviews

Alice a young student in France, is a tease. She loves to flirt with one athletic youth who appears to be of Arab descent, Said. This young student likes Alice, but she plays hard to get, and for all purposes, she has a thing in mind for him. Luc, another student, likes Alice as well, but he is too shy to act on his instincts. This girl is bent in getting her revenge on the more confident Said and she enlists Luc to be the one that will carry it for her. After Alice insinuates herself to Said, Luc appears on the scene and stabs his rival to death.

Luc and Alice have to dispose of the body and for that they must take him away. For that, Luc has borrowed his father car and the body is taken to a forest to be buried. Unknown to them, they are being watched. The killers lose the way to the car, but they find a lonely cabin that appear to he empty. Little prepare them when a strange man comes into the hut and overpowers them to a filthy lower part of the house.

The man has plans for the couple. When Alice plead with this person by offering sex for their freedom, he tells them he likes his boys fattened and his girls thin before he eats them. With that, it is clear it is Luc who is the chosen one to fulfill the forest man's own sexual appetite. Luc in fact, is sexually turned on by this crude man in ways one did not expect. When they eventually overpower the ogre, and only then, they engage in sex as the animals of the forest surround them in a sort of Disney reverie.

Francois Ozon, one of France's best new directors, wrote this film of 1999 with the idea of perhaps retelling the fairy tale story of "Hansel and Gretel". The story parallel the children's narrative with a more menacing and cruel reality. Mr. Ozon's version clearly shows that it is Luc who is the one that awakens to the kind of sex that he has lusted for, but never was able to get. The film has a little bit of everything including cannibalism that comes into play in this update of a Grimm's brothers tale.

The excellent Jeremie Renier, who has worked repeatedly with the Dardennes Brothers, clearly demonstrates he is one of the most interesting actors working in Europe today. He is perfect as Luc. Natacha Regnier, a beautiful actress, is seen as Alice, the calculating girl too sure of what she can do to the more impressionable Luc. Miki Mnojilovic does a good job impersonating the strange man of the woods.

"Les amants criminel" is obviously not for the great masses, but it will reward Mr. Ozon's fans in unexpected ways.

Alice and Luc are in love but Luc is unable to fully consummate their relationship. One day Alice claims she was gang-raped by a bunch of boys led on by one of Luc's schoolmates. Her and Luc plan to kill the boy and dump the body...but things take a disastrous turn.

OK it doesn't SOUND like "Hansel and Gretel" but that does kick in during the second half of the film. The film is disturbing--it contains some extreme violence, cannibalism and in your face sex scenes. I spent most of the film being really sickened but I gave this some space and...slowly...I THINK I understand what it's saying.

EXTREME SPOILER!!! Alice and Luc are kidnapped by a woodsman who locks Alice in the basement and proceeds to sexually seduce Luc. Also it's made clear that Alice lied about being assaulted--they kill someone for no reason at all. Also it's shown that Luc likes having sex with the guy. At the end Alice is punished (killed) for her sins and Luc is led away pleading for the police not to harm the woodsman. This film seems to be about a young man becoming aware of his sexual orientation. Also it shows the hetero relationship in a very negative light while the gay one is shown matter of factly. Is it saying gay is better than straight? As I gay man I find this quite fascinating. END EXTREME SPOILER

This is not for everyone--the extreme violence and sex is going to disturb most viewers--but I found it fascinating. I can truthfully only give it a 7--I can't say I enjoyed the film but it did make me think.

Les amants criminels (1999)is François Ozon's topsy turvey world of children's fairy tales and psychotic horror based primarily on Hansel and Gretal but with nods to other children's stories. But perhaps to, Ozon recognizes the frequently violent aspects of these tales and has recasts this one in modern terms with Alice and Luc as the high school students whose adventure is presaged by Alice's recitation (shown in flashback) of a fragment from a poem by Rimbaud: Hell cannot attack pagans I'm still alive! Later damnation's delights will be more profound Quick a crime! That I may fall into the void, by human law So the crime is murder, performed by willing dupe Luc, of unsure sexuality, under the spell of the psychotic Alice. The children retreat to a forest to dispose of the body and become lost, eventually taking refuge in a hut of an ogre who intends to fatten Luc and starve Alice. The ogre take a fancy to Luc and after some preliminaries partakes of Luc in a way that goes some way toward deciding his sexuality. But still loyal to Alice, Luc engineers an escape and the pair eventually attempt consummation of their love naked in a clearing under the benign gaze of the forest creatures in a bizarre nod to a Disney animation feature. It all ends badly however in a deviation from the living happily ever after coda of fairy tales. To heighten the sense of the incongruous, Ozon adds a score that include themes from such great love stories as Trastan und Isolde but he is intending to amuse here rather than chill as in his Regarde la mer An entertainment, definitely not a statement. Not for those offended by the homoerotic.

CAUTION!! Contains spoilers

This is a strange story in that normal morals are suspended. We see the main characters, April and Luc, brutally kill Said, a schoolmate, in the opening scenes. While we are not eager to treat the pair as innocents, they are curiously child-like.

Alice is a pretty girl who, like a small child, can be utterly cruel one moment and then tender the next. She ruthlessly plots the murder of a boy that she lusts after. She lies to get her virginal boyfriend to help her do the killing. Yet later, she cries when he accidentally runs over a rabbit in their get-away car. What's more, she anxiously insists that they bury the rabbit, while the murdered boy's body is still in the car trunk. In one telling scene, she is in a store to buy a shovel with which to bury the boy that they have killed. As she strolls leisurely past a display of Barbie dolls we see that they catch her interest. I half expected her to stop and buy a doll along with the shovel.

Luc is Alice's virginal boyfriend. As we see from his brutal participation in the opening killing, he is not an innocent either. He is still a virgin, but that may be that he's gay and hasn't figured it out yet. When April tries to seduce him Luc pushes her away and we hear that this is not the first time that Luc `can't'. He has no trouble `sticking' Said. He stabs him brutally after watching longingly for a while.

After their crime, Luc steals his family car and the young couple takes off to bury the body committing a petty theft at a jewelry store along the way.

But all does not go as planned

After burying the body in the woods, they become lost and end up discovering a rustic cabin in the woods, inhabited by an ogre or `man of the woods'.

When they are caught stealing food, `The man' imprisons them in a cellar under the cabin. Later he brings Luc up from the cellar and locks Luc in a dog collar and fastens him to the bed by tying the end of the rope to the bed.

The `man of the woods' looks vile and does gross things like skinning rabbits but seems to treat Luc gently and while he does molest Luc and eventually have anal sex with him these scenes are non-violent and its ambiguous as to how Luc reacts.

Throughout, the movie is curiously nonjudgmental and a bit ambiguous which I thought made it interesting. It doesn't place any value judgments on the murder, nor about the homosexual leaning of Luc, nor of `the man' molesting him. It even makes `the man' out to be a bit benevolent (When Luc and April are escaping he opens his eyes at the last moment and looks knowingly at Luc but does nothing.

The film does have its plot holes and these did bother me. Several times we see Luc straining `at the end of his rope' and yet the end is fastened to the bed with a very simple knot. Why doesn't he just untie the knot?

When Luc escapes he doesn't cut himself out of the collar that the `the man' put on him. I can't decide if this was a practical point or a symbolic one.

In the end, after Luc has rescued the girl, he can now perform sexually with her. Prior to that the most intimate things that he did with her was to do her hair and make-up.

You should be warned that 'Les Amants Criminels' is not an easy viewing, despite being a French movie with almost one decade of age. What can impress viewers after the various 'Saw' or 'Hostel' installments you may ask? It is not indeed in the graphical details that lie both the attraction and rejection that this film can cause. It is more in the surprising combination.

'Les Amants Criminels' is sort of a meeting between fairy tales and horror, between 'Texas Chainsaw' and 'Bambi' in a setting that reminds 'Blair Witch Project'. It also resembles Larry Clark's 'Bully' as the heroes are teenagers planning and executing the murder of a colleague of theirs, with the huge difference that director's Francois Ozon's heroes seem completely clueless and lack any kind of moral sense. If we can understand that teenagers lack social awareness, and that their instincts and search of auto-discovery prevails on the connection with the real world, yet we seldom or never have met a couple lacking any awareness about suffering excepting their own. Behind their angelic and sexy appearances the two heroes (very well acted by Natacha Regnier and Jeremie Renier) are cold blood murderers who kill and are horribly punished by a series of atrocities up to the size of their deeds. Their behavior defies logic, their feelings seem to be permanently wrongly channeled, and even their tentative of redemption through love filmed in an idealist and ironical manner is cut off abruptly by tragedy as the real world hits back with the power of a hurricane on those who have broken its laws.

Did the director who also co-authored the script intent to make any moral statement here? I doubt, as the final scenes presents the main hero back into his convoluted logic giving forgiveness to his evil tormentor, whom according to what happened on screen we cannot consider but a tool of punishment and source of horror in the story. And yet the film does have a magnetism of its own, and the story as incredible as it may be is very well told. At the end of the film I did not get any better understanding of the characters, as their motivation seems to be impossible to explain or understand. I did enjoy however the exquisite cinematography, and liked the coherent logic of the absurd behavior of the characters who do not cease to surprise on the wrong side of our normal judgment, all over the film.

One of the things that tends to make non-English-speaking films more interesting than their Hollywood counterparts is the degree of imagination that filmmakers are free to exercise. Since there appears to be less pressure to conform to the marketing men's ideas of what should make a profitable movie, these films often have a degree of originality not found in conventional blockbusters. Sadly, in this case, Mr Ozon has chosen to use this freedom to make a tedious, generic, mindless story which the watcher suspects is just thinly disguised sexual fantasy played out in the form of a thriller.

The main issues I have with this film are:

1. The lack of imagination. There are no twists, no unexpected surprises, nothing that suggests that the writer put any thought into the story. Indeed the story seems only to be the means to an end - with the end being the boy's "sexual awakening" (being tied up and buggered by a hermit in a log cabin - seriously!).

2. The characters have absolutely no depth. The girl is just malicious and unpleasant (females = bad) and does next to nothing in the entire film, the boy is limp and aimless (poor confused boy - all he needed was a good raping!) and the hermit was a generic filthy villain who's purpose was just to, well, "awaken" the boy.

3. The subtext. Imagine the boy was a female character instead. Imagine, in this move, that she was raped by a nasty mountain man and discovered that it was what she wanted all along. Offensive? I'd say so!

Technically, the cinematography is fine, the sound is fine etc etc, but in the end the story is paper-thin, the characters are bland and poorly-written, and the message is questionable.

This is one of the most harrowing thrillers I have ever seen. It essentially is a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel legend, where the waifs are two French students fleeing the police after their brutal impulse slaying of an Arab student, and the wicked witch is a woodsman with cannibalistic and pederastic leanings. I am always surprised when movies like this get made, first, because of the outré nature of the plot, and secondly, because the directorial talent involved, coming, apparently, out of nowhere, seems too good to be true. The final scene, in which wide-eyed Disneyesque forest creatures preside over the coupling of the young lovers, left me giggling in appreciation. The movie is infused with this same inerrant sense of irony. Not a movie for the faint-hearted, though.

Honestly, I cannot say I enjoy this film too much. Although for years Ozon has impressed me with his penetrative observation and depiction of human psychology,which comes into blossom in many of his great works such as Sitcom and Swimming Pool.

This film somehow reminds me of Hard Candy,which you cannot put any judgment upon as the moral code is totally invalid there.In this film,we have a beautiful girl Alice -half sweet and half vicious; an introverted and simple boy Luc.The couple plan a murder and escape to a wood where they unexpectedly encounter an odd man (whom,we soon find out,is a gay) And the story takes a turn at this point. In this man's seedy and dark house,awful things take place -while Alice is locked in the basement,Luc is treated as a sex doll of the old man. Later they even notice the body of Sid,the guy murdered by them in the basement. Eventually,like most clichéd thrillers,they escape and attract the police,paying their penalty.

While I didn't find the main plot much original,I did feel that the sub-plot quite interesting.Firstly,it doesn't expose Luc's homosexual tendency clearly,which leaves the audiences to figure out whether Luc kills Sid out of jealousy.In fact,several details gives away this message,including the most important one: Luc cannot have a 'hard-on'when he's with Alice.Secondly,it is quite doubtful that whether Alice truly loves Luc.The dream sequence in the basement shows that Alice has fantasies about Sid yet is essentially disappointed over her weak boyfriend.Therefore,the reason why she wants to kill Sid is perhaps a sort of perversity -get high from visceral stimulation.Ultimately,the relationship between the two is a rather perverse one.

As for the morality of the film,I'd say it deconstructs any stable moral system and points no way out;what's more,audiences are put in a strange position where they cannot draw a clear line between the right and the wrong.Alice,both sweet and vicious,can be pitiful in the basement and wicked in rest of the time;the old man is a gay and a cannibalist,yet in the end he lets the couple go;the police,so-called imposer of justice,shoot Alice mercilessly and beat the old man...perhaps the only character that is slightly 'positive'is Luc,yet he is a murder and a potential gay.These explain why I call the film amoral.It is so cynical that it negates all the characters.The audiences are left there drinking down the poison of criminality but unable to find any antidote.

That being said,I cannot figure out the intention of Ozon -a social critique or just another encouragement to voyeurism? Or both? Because if anyone walks out of the cinema saying 'I'm now a better person',I doubt it.But if one says the film is for those who have naive views about the world,much appreciated -it's an eye opener.

Sometimes when I watch a film, I say to myself later "why did I even bother finishing that film?"--this is exactly what happened when I finished watching Les Amants Criminels. Despite some excellent moments and a couple decent plot twists, I felt dirty and uneasy about having watched this mess through to the end. It wasn't just because the film was so sexually graphic or violent--though these are big turnoffs for me and many other viewers. It was these factors PLUS the fact that certain things just don't need to be shown on film and I worry about people who WANT to see this in films. For example, the two young and totally annoying "lovers" are kidnapped by a guy who lives in the woods. The girl is kept locked in a dungeon with a rotting corpse and the guy is brought upstairs to be anally raped and fed the leg of the rotting corpse in the basement. I just didn't need to see this. Why it was shown is possibly because some directors and writers include awful scenes like this because they don't believe in the power of the film and toss in sick stuff to try to either generate controversy or appeal to prurient interests. As a result, I just can't see recommending this film to anyone.

It does get a score of three because there is the germ of a really good film there--it just gets lost among all the crap. The notion of a killing and the odd motivation behind it (that doesn't become apparent until later) is interesting. Plus, her boyfriend who seems to have some serious problems with his latent homosexual desires is interesting as well. BUT, having him raped and then enjoy it is just sick and unnecessary--and socially irresponsible. I would have really thought it interesting if they had further explored this character's latent homosexuality--it WAS apparent several times throughout the film.

Additionally, the film is actually a very twisted take on Hansel and Gretel. A modern retelling of the tale is a great idea--just not when it is combined with a touches from THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE and DELIVERANCE! The people who made this mess should be ashamed, but I'm sure they went on to make money and more sick stuff like this.

I like François Ozon. Or at least, I like the idea of François Ozon. I like his challenge to bourgeois morality in Sitcom - I like his attempt to integrate this challenge into a technically limiting format. However, when it comes to committing his ideas to celluloid, I don't think that Ozon's ideas quite work. Be it in his shorts for Gay Majorettes in Space or See the Sea, his pieces always come off as half-arsed, as if they'd been good ideas in his head but not on film. Les Amants Criminels/Criminal Lovers goes half way to resolving this problem. In it, we see three rather brilliant leading performances, from Natacha Régnier (La Vie Rêvée des Anges) and Jérémie Renier as the two amants and an utterly remarkable (and disturbing) one from Miki Manojlovic (Underground) as the man who traps them in the forest. Hence, the film has been described as twisted Hansel and Gretel, and that it certainly is. Whether or not it was Ozon's intention to write a modern-day fairy tale (or whether or not this comparison/allusion is important) is not clear. However, what is clear is that, on some level, he finds this funny. Therefore, the whole thing rests, to a certain extent, upon whether you share Ozon's sense of humour (remember, in Sitcom we had a rat providing the apparatus for Ozon's exposition of middle-class morés, thus introducing S&M and masturbation to the sitcom genre ... and thus attacking his whole sitcom allusion with it). I found myself laughing ... nervously, maybe, but I found it very, very funny. Chilling? Not particularly. Unsympathetic? Certainly - in fact, Regnier's character is brilliantly drawn as both repugnant and seductive. But this is also my main problem with the film, because, while it is very clever, with a great use of music and some lovely visual touches, on a human, psychological level, Ozon's film doesn't rise above the insight afforded to us by an average TV movie-of-the-week. Yes, the oppositions of the characters are clearly defined, but they're clearly defined in tabloid black-and-white. Alice may well represent the 'other' of Luc, but we are never invited to speculate (although speculate is all that we can do, given the lack of information). Luc is seduced; Alice is a neo-noir anti-heroine. But that's as far as it goes, and that's why 'Les Amants Criminels' can be no more than an interesting sideline, a piece of fluff, rather than anything more profound. Nevertheless, Ozon shows considerable visual flair, and great talent for a certain tension, and he always has that pretty sick sense of humour to fall back on should everything else fail.

I made a mistake going to this movie on the grounds, that I had nothing to do and the idea, that if the movie is shown in the cinema it can not be that bad.

This movie was my worst cinema experience by far. I agree that Ozon is successful in shocking the viewer. I was shocked by the irrationality of the plot. The girl kills the man, without any regrets, but cries over some stupid rabbit. The couple get lost in the forest. How can you do that in all the Europe is beyond me. Especially in France. The guy is having problems to make love to his girlfriend, but when he is raped by a man, suddenly all problems disappear.

To sum up all the film is about stupid people doing stupid things. And I already know that. And you can get all the shock you want by watching evening news. I would not advise to go this movie, for me it was quite eye opening, but be prepared.