Critics reviews

Eastern Boys seems like it can do just about anything, and in this way its creator lands closer to shape-shifting filmmakers like Miguel Gomes and Apichatpong Weerasethakul than its seemingly linear plotting would suggest. And even if Campillo's film fell apart after that home invasion, what a magnificent sequence it is!

The French drama Eastern Boys opens with two of the year's most extraordinary sustained tours de force, back to back... [It] doesn't maintain the exhilarating blend of tension and elegance that distinguishes its initial half hour—if it did, it would be the movie of the year.

A lesser movie—or a more coherent one—would have ended with murder... The film is suffused with deep, tranquil, natural light, but any claim to rectitude is troubling.

Campillo is a gay man, who, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, took a few years off to work full-time against the scourge. Born in Morocco, he just may be in part of Arab descent. I do not know whether he has in his intimate life taken on the role of exploiter or exploited, or both, but he is obviously acquainted with the dynamics involved. His informed take on marginalization is extremely affecting. He has the audience in the palm of his hand.

What could easily have been a sensationalist drama, about a bourgeois man getting into deep water when he walks on the wild side, becomes a much more complex and delicate affair.

The heart of Eastern Boys' ambition beats in its challenging, interlacing narrative structure and in its determination to tell a potent, lasting story about uncertainty and compromise, where nothing is cleanly resolvable... It's one of the most complex and beguiling cinematic love stories since Wong Kar-wai's turn-of-the-century monument In the Mood for Love.

While Campillo does graceful work — the way he draws focus in a scene is a pleasure — the script drags and the pseudo-romance is hard to believe, especially when one plot point concerns Daniel asking for a bulk-purchase sex rate. "Eastern Boys" never quite fulfills the promise of those first few minutes.

As the film progresses, Campillo daringly shifts forms through a propensity for long sequences with abrupt ends that complicate the film's socioeconomic politics. Eastern Boys is a ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are not just the prevailing modes of interaction, but the raison d'être for human existence.

Eastern Boys is better at capturing intimacy than it is action, and matters aren't helped by the presence of Daniil Vorobyov as the perpetually shirtless gang leader who is shaded from the off as a kind of shouty, pantomime villain. The final stretch of the film verges on the ridiculous as the story turns to a violent, bedroom-hopping farce and has all the characters come together, once more, in a cruddy hotel to shout and cause lots of melodramatic destruction.

The Orizzonti Best Film Award went to Robin Campillo's Eastern Boys, which, with its depiction of rent boys from Eastern Europe and a middle-aged man's passion for one of them, can be seen as a well-meaning comment on the displays of homophobia seen earlier this year in France. Still, Campillo's run-of-the-mill realism is both too tasteful and too eager to appear risqué.

Bearing all the formal refinement and discursive human interest one associates with Campillo's regular collaborator Laurent Cantet, this tale of a middle-aged businessman who gets more than he bargained for when cruising in the Gare du Nord is by turns a frightening home-invasion drama, a tender love story and a tense hide-and-seek thriller, with far more control over these unsettling tonal slides than initially seems feasible.