Kritiken

It's a celebration of their connection as a series of discoveries and hard truths. Becoming attuned to one's intellectual and sexual identity takes time, and Techiné gives them both the necessary space. "I'm proud you're sensitive," Marianne tells Damien, hitting the preverbal nail on the head.

Witnessing Téchiné carve his novelistic impulse down to its rawer, handheld essence... has been to watch a senior artist push through to the other side and find a new, exhilarating freshness. In no film is this more apparent than in Being 17, his latest, one of the most underrated and underseen of 2016. More than even the narratively expansive The Witnesses, it's here the Téchiné of the '90s meets the Téchiné of now, resulting in a kind of Wild Reeds for 2016. It is equally great.

Precisely observant, getting physical with his characters' bodies, Téchiné still resonates with a life force and its joys and heartaches.

If "Being 17" represents a heartening return to form for its director, the film feels no less meaningfully shaped by Sciamma, who recently directed the brilliant "Girlhood" and is no stranger to tales of adolescent sexual exploration. Téchiné seems as invigorated by their collaboration as he is by their unusual choice of setting, a realm whose wild beauty, inclement weather and visibly shifting seasons lend the proceedings a powerfully elemental dimension.

Téchiné, despite being 70, shows a sharp eye not just for how young people of today dress and accessorize, but how they carry themselves. For this film he's enlisted "Girlhood" director Céline Sciamma as a co-writer, and working with the younger filmmaker certainly must have helped. But this isn't a film that makes a big deal of its contemporary authenticity; it wears its carefully measured elements lightly, the better to shine a light on its intriguing characters.

The inchoate hatred that the two teenagers feel for each other — often expressed via blows to the head and chest — masks and morphs into its opposite. That's not an especially novel tack, of course, but what does feel new and urgent is Tom and Damien's first love scene, one in which desire is both anarchic and democratic... Being 17 boldly examines the fear of letting go and giving in — the terror, in short, of becoming an adult.

There's a great moment where Tom and Damien first bond: Hiding from a rainstorm at the entrance to a cavern, they are lit in silhouette as they pass a rolled cigarette back and forth with their wet hands. There is nothing that the movie can express in dialogue that can match these brief nonverbal exchanges. Téchiné has made one of his simplest and most elemental films, which is both Being 17's most arresting feature and its weakness.

It shows plenty of evidence of its director-cowriter's sensitivity and passion, yet for me it pales alongside such explosive earlier features as Wild Reeds (1994), Thieves (1996), and Unforgivable (2011).

More than half of the films competing for the awards were remarkable and worthy of mention, among them... an aesthetically much more classical modernist register, André Téchiné's tale of teenage passion and nascent gay self-awareness, Being 17.

Being 17 is a film propelled by the raw, physical energy of male youth—energy that primarily finds expression through violence. From the moment Thomas deliberately trips Damien in literature class, erratic fistfights erupt between them constantly both on and off school grounds. They fight out of hatred and out of vicious jealousy, but ultimately, they fight out of fear and confusion. When emotions are sublimated into erotic connection, it makes the love scene all the more satisfying.

Class, race (the young farmer is Maghrebi), sexuality, experience and ambition all come into play in this sensitive, sometimes surprising study of adolescent upheaval; terrific performances and Techiné's eloquent use of landscape make for engrossing drama.

The film explores the rapport between masculine boys in an unprecedented way, respecting its nuances, complications, and contradictions. Téchiné approaches his subjects with the same delicate queerness of Wild Reeds, doing justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness, heterosexuality and homosexuality.