This film begins with an intriguing central character - a beautiful young Swiss gay man who lives with in a sexless relationship with a slightly older woman but divides his time between promiscuous sexual encounters with the (not always young or attractive) men he meets on the internet, and working a boring day job on a production line in a chocolate factory - and has an excellent sense of visual storytelling to hook you into his tale. Yet pretty soon, I realised that pretty Loic was being set up by the film maker as not merely a portrait of a working class gay boy making his chaotic way through contemporary consumer society, but as a moral lesson for the audience, in which they learn that (yawn) anonymous sexual encounters aren't the answer, it's bad to be selfish and celebrities (he's stalking a sexy, second-rate footballer) aren't what they're cracked up to be. As the title suggests, the film takes a moral angle on the "stupid boy" at its centre, and so the promise of being dropped into a genuine 21st century life without editorialising comes to nothing.
The film never really tackles why Loic gets so hung up by his own sexual waywardness and then projects his guilt onto others, as when he calls his girl friend a "slut" for sleeping with her boyfriend. There's something going on here about social pressures and normalising sexualities, but the film is so content on putting its hero through a pretty run-of-the-mill rites of passage story that it doesn't really take note of the class-ridden, banally consumerist world around him. A number of the plot devices - the accidental death of the girl friend, the "dream" meeting with the footballer in the Alps - are rather laboured, although worst of all is the unseen director surrogate (called, like the film's auteur, Lionel) who meets with Loic to question him and instruct him that "men can be interested in you without wanting to have sex with you." Which is pretty dishonest of Lionel, having sold the film as a portrait of a young kid who is pictured stripped on the publicity material and who he knows the target demographic will want to shag rotten.
In the final act, Loic spends all his money on an expensive digital camera, announces that he rejects all of the roles (insider or outsider) that society has to offer him, asserts that he will "tell my own stories" and promptly meets the boy of his dreams in a fairground. Frankly, this is sentimental, glib and philosophically naive. Loic will have to choose to inhabit at least some of the roles which he so stridently rejects, although I suppose that the voice over which announces all of this might be a satire on his naivety, but it isn't played that way.
Garçon stupide would have been better off not indulging in the jejune moralising which tries to make it a heard-it-all-before moral lesson rather than a truly impressionistic portrait; it betrays its lead character by ticking him off, rather than showing him deepening himself in an existential problem to which there is no glib solution, no matter that bourgeois gay filmmakers and their DVD collecting consumers might desire one.
The film never really tackles why Loic gets so hung up by his own sexual waywardness and then projects his guilt onto others, as when he calls his girl friend a "slut" for sleeping with her boyfriend. There's something going on here about social pressures and normalising sexualities, but the film is so content on putting its hero through a pretty run-of-the-mill rites of passage story that it doesn't really take note of the class-ridden, banally consumerist world around him. A number of the plot devices - the accidental death of the girl friend, the "dream" meeting with the footballer in the Alps - are rather laboured, although worst of all is the unseen director surrogate (called, like the film's auteur, Lionel) who meets with Loic to question him and instruct him that "men can be interested in you without wanting to have sex with you." Which is pretty dishonest of Lionel, having sold the film as a portrait of a young kid who is pictured stripped on the publicity material and who he knows the target demographic will want to shag rotten.
In the final act, Loic spends all his money on an expensive digital camera, announces that he rejects all of the roles (insider or outsider) that society has to offer him, asserts that he will "tell my own stories" and promptly meets the boy of his dreams in a fairground. Frankly, this is sentimental, glib and philosophically naive. Loic will have to choose to inhabit at least some of the roles which he so stridently rejects, although I suppose that the voice over which announces all of this might be a satire on his naivety, but it isn't played that way.
Garçon stupide would have been better off not indulging in the jejune moralising which tries to make it a heard-it-all-before moral lesson rather than a truly impressionistic portrait; it betrays its lead character by ticking him off, rather than showing him deepening himself in an existential problem to which there is no glib solution, no matter that bourgeois gay filmmakers and their DVD collecting consumers might desire one.