A brief extract of four kids’ lives somewhere in France. Quentin, who won a writers contest and now pays more attention to his career as an author than to his friends, beautiful Julie, his girl-friend, much more mature than she looks, falling in love with Quentin’s very best friend Jimmy, who is kind of stuck in his unability of self-expression and grown up under bad social circumstances. And there is the shy boy Samir, exiled from Algeria, who lost his “brother” and only friend some time ago. Samir heavily falls in love with Quentin, but he can’t handle it… —IMDb
Gaël Morel (born September 25, 1972) is a French film director, screenwriter and actor. Morel was born in Villefranche-sur-Saône, Rhône, France, a small town of 30,000 inhabitants outside Lyon. He also grew up in the nearby little village of Lacenas in the Villefranche district.
At the age of 15, Morel left home to go to pursue film studies in Lyon, afterwards moving to Paris. There he met with the acclaimed French director André Téchiné who cast him in the lead role of François in the multi César-winning 1994 film Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) which brought him to wider fame, earning much critical praise for his performance, and a 1995 César nomination for Most Promising Young Actor.
While his Wild Reeds co-stars Élodie Bouchez and Stéphane Rideau have both gone on to successful acting careers (he has often cast them in his own films), Morel has chosen to pursue a career behind the camera, as filmmaking has always been his passion. —Wikipedia
While some of the performances hinder the film at times, the film is overall well made. The story is simple and that works to its advantage. The four main characters are interesting and well developed, even if at times we do not understand their actions. I felt there were many references to the French New Wave, and it was interesting to see how they were executed and how they contributed to the story.
