Song of a Reformed Headhunter

"Being 17" ("Quand on a 17 ans") (2016) is a study of two very different families, whose 17-year-old boys discover, in a stumbling and aggressive fashion, their love for one another. Directed by André Téchiné, the film is beautifully shot, alternating between the snowy mountains of Thoma's farm and the rooms of Damien's suburban house. Sandrine Kiberlain is wonderful as Damien's doctor mother, Marianne. Kacey Mottet Klein (Damien) and Corentin Fila (Thomas) both put in persuasive performances.

Last night GH and I watched Wild Reeds (1994), directed by André Téchiné. As an imdb reviewer observes, the film’s slight looseness does not matter in what is essentially, and beautifully, an insightful depiction of French coming-of-age in the time of the Algerian war. The title comes from the La Fontaine fable about the oak and the reed. François Forestier (Gaël Morel), the model student who discovers he is gay, is the reed. He bends in the wind between the oaks: his Communist girlfriend Maïté Alvarez (Élodie Bouchez), his crush Henri Mariani (Frédéric Gorny), a pied-noir, an Algerian-born Frenchman, and his seducer Serge Bartolo (Stéphane Rideau) who lost his older brother to the war. Politically uncommitted, sexually undecided, emotionally yearning, François is instrumental in bringing together his friends in the last extended scene of the movie. Swimming in the river or making love on its bank, the teenagers put down for an afternoon their burdens of loss and commitment, and r...