Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (2015)
Directed by Eva Husson
Biarritz. Sixteen-year-old George, the high school hottie, falls in love with Alex. To get his attention, she initiates a group game with Alex, Nikita, Laetitia and Gabriel. They will discover, test, and push the limits of their sexuality.
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Opening with a permissive Carl Jung quote that speaks to the trajectory of self-improvement (“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”), Husson’s directorial debut is too derivative of forebears like “Kids” and “The Rules of Attraction” to earn a spot alongside them, but it nevertheless moves along on the strength of its slyly transgressive undertow.
Thematically, Husson’s film most obviously calls to mind Larry Clark ’s “ Kids ,” while stylistically, it appears Husson is borrowing from every movie Sofia Coppola has ever made.
The French film, a sort of iPhone generation “Kids,” takes a devastatingly aloof approach as a pair of nice girls (Daisy Broom, Marilyn Lima) drifting along on the tides of the culture agree to participate in an ongoing orgy masterminded by Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), who has had sex with so many girls he’s lost count.
Folks on the festival circuit have referred to it as a Gallic version of Kids, but the comparison is more illustrative than apt.
Opposite in spirit to a shocker like Larry Clark’s “Kids,” “Bang Gang” doesn’t aim to titillate or to alarm.
It’s a steamy debut that recalls the dreaminess and restlessness of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in the way it captures teen spirit, yet Husson doesn’t allow room for her many characters to breathe, which in turn makes their heady passage a tad underwhelming by its conclusion.
D.p. (and fellow AFI grad) Mattias Troelstrup’s camera ogles the onscreen boys and girls alike, visually framing this memory through the shifting vantage of two teenage girls, timid Laetitia (Daisy Broom) and her more aggressively sex-hungry best friend George (Marilyn Lima), while privileging the group’s worst offender, Alex (Finnegan Oldfield, recently seen in Thomas Bidegain’s “Les Cowboys”), with a “The Virgin Suicides”-style voiceover that sounds as if it was written and added at a very late stage.