A Good Boy (2008 TV Movie) User Reviews

Sensitive portrayal of a sensitive subject

[RichardvonLust · 8/10 · 16 May 2011]

Sven is just 17, looks completely normal and could easily be our own son or brother. That is the strength of this film. Sven appears to be like any other teenager but he has a dark secret. As much as he loathes his own feelings Sven is irresistibly attracted to prepubescent boys. He searches them out with his video camera posing as a casting scout and persuading them to dance around half naked, kiss his finger and perhaps even more.

His father discovers this and wrestles with the problem. But can it be solved? Does outright revulsion and condemnation achieve anything? Will Sven always be a pedophile? These are the central questions of a drama that has huge relevance to our modern society. It is well acted, crisply scripted and hugely sympathetic to the sheer tragedy of pedophilia and our general difficulties in dealing with it.

Well recommended.

Love Life in the Fourth Reich

[edmund-marlowe · 8/10 · 19 December 2014]

Two good-looking boys are flirting. Sven encourages Patrick to try different poses before his camcorder. A laughing Patrick mischievously flashes his naked bottom at him and blows kisses. It is a charming scene full of laughter and youthful spontaneity. Surely only homophobic dinosaurs could object? But wait, I failed to mention that Sven is 17 and Patrick looks, horror of all horrors, only 13 or 14, an age gap about as grotesque as that between Romeo and his 13-year-old Juliet. Besides, this is the 21st century, not the barbarous Renaissance, and we are looking at this literally through the eyes of Sven's father Achim, watching the scene recorded on his son's camcorder, not through the eyes of the misguided or socially irresponsible bard. By this stage we have been left in no doubt that Achim is a genuinely loving parent, but as in other respects he is a quite ordinary, decent, modern bloke (a divorced taxi driver), he naturally cannot control his visceral revulsion. "You disgusting, dirty pig!" he shouts as he punches his son hard in the face, leading the boy to attempt suicide.

Sven is adamant he loves Patrick and could never therefore hurt him. This failure to see things the correct way unsurprisingly infuriates his father. Achim, whose socially acceptable love life consisting of a failed marriage, a failing relationship and a visit to a prostitute, runs in interesting juxtaposition to Sven's forbidden one, is certain enough of knowing what real love is to assure his son he knows nothing about it. Unfortunately, Sven is not convinced, possibly because Achim sees no need to offer a rational explanation for something so obvious, and asks his father to lock him up in his bedroom to stop him following his longings for younger boys. Only Achim's girlfriend Julia realizes what Sven needs is "help", in other words having his mind reprogrammed enough to understand that what he has experienced as impulses to love are really so unspeakably evil that he will no longer wish to act on them, and may thereby come to terms with an emotionally and sexually sterile life. But silly Achim won't subscribe to the modern dogma of immutable orientation and clings with predictably tragic consequences to the belief his son can be changed.

There is one serious incongruity, which nearly derails this as a story with clear meaning. Almost the entire story of Sven's love life concerns the clearly pubescent Patrick, who is not only encouraging rather than merely consenting, but even after his mother discovers enough of the truth to denounce Sven and Sven calls off their friendship, continues to pursue him to his home and to try to undermine his resolve with dazzling smiles and more blown kisses. And yet what actually seals Sven's fate is picking up on a train and attempting to seduce a boy of ten who looks even younger and obviously uncomfortable. Though Achim warns Sven he could have gone to prison or a mental asylum for what he did with Patrick, had he actually done so, it would require looking at their story with myopically jaundice-tinted 21st-century glasses to see Sven rather than society as the abuser. The ten-year-old who is frightened enough to run away is a very different matter and out of character. It is as if the script-writer realized at the last moment that what he had written looked dangerously discernible as an indictment of society rather than a look into the quandary of how to control Sven, so brought in the little-boy scene in a clumsy effort to restore the balance.

There was a time about halfway between the Third Reich and today when most Germans' reactions to Sven's feelings for Patrick would have been far more indulgent. Germany and other countries that had experienced National Socialist rule were then what were derisively known as permissive societies, which is to say they were taking deeply to heart the lessons from the generation before and flirting with freedom and toleration. Guter Junge illustrates how thoroughly these lessons have now been forgotten. Even as I write, the grandchildren of the Third Reich have whipped themselves up into such fury that they may not be able to send one of their M.P.s to prison for having pictures of naked boys innocently playing out of doors, once an everyday sight in the warmer parts of the world, that they are introducing new thought-crime laws to imprison anyone having pictures of even clothed children that in the imagination of their judges are felt to be erotic. I am sure Herr Hitler would be proud of them; without doubt it will help restore prison numbers to the impressive levels of his day.

Watching this film, it is much easier to understand how ordinary Germans could once have felt such effortless hatred and contempt for innocent Jews; it is a deeply chilling reminder of how easily people who believe in their own decency can be led into such a total lack of sympathy or understanding for those classed as "others" that they feel sure of seeing wrong where there is none. The Germans today are still more humane than many in the particular mania that ruins Sven's life, but it is especially poignant in their case.

One thing I will say for modern Germany though is that in none of the three countries most responsible for ending the Third Reich would it be possible to produce a film for television nearly so honest and neutral on this subject. It is excellently acted by the main protagonists. The varied music is especially well chosen and holds the audience's attention during the more meandering scenes of this good but very depressing story.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, amazon.com/dp/1481222112 another boy's tragedy.

Fatal attraction

[Pan32 · 8/10 · 25 July 2015]

An intelligent depiction of a taboo theme: obsession with young boys.

Growing up I was aware of that situation but it was always the cuties that were propositioned so I never had to deal with it. But from the time of the ancient Greeks to today's Catholic Church, it is something that is part of human nature in some individuals. No one has ever explained it as far as I know. Germine Greer In her book "The Beautiful Boy" describes boy's beauty as supernatural. But she adds she is talking about the prepubescent: sans body hair, clear eyed and with a mane of hair. The Greeks viewed the male as the pinnacle of creation, but they were referring to young boys, their bodies still unblemished by age.

This film makes no attempt at psychological explication. We are presented with a handsome 17 year old, Sven, who is fatally attracted to younger boys. The boy in this case, Patrick, is well aware of his power over Sven and there are hints that Patrick's lack of a father and a careless home life might cause him to be drawn to Sven. Small boys frequently idolize older boys. We are never given evidence of any sexual acts. But such is the climate nowadays Sven must pay for his impulses.

Sebastian Urzendowsky does a fine job as Sven and Sandro Lohmann as Patrick is convincing as Sven's Siren.

Teenage offender: the grim reality of it all

[atlantis2006 · 25 January 2011]

Fischer's film tackles on a most controversial theme. However, this is not about "shock value"; there is no feasting on images of strong content, quite the opposite, in fact. Here, what matters most is the consequence of relationships of a sexual nature between a 17-year-old and a 11-year-old. As the film starts one's attention could meander randomly; however, Guter Junge's superb music selection conveys a dense and somewhat gloomy atmosphere that anticipates conflicts.

Sven is a 17 years old boy that hangs out with younger kids. His mother has passed away recently and one can't help but to feel compassion towards him when he stares sadly at his mother's photography. Soon, Sven's father is uneasy about his son's lack of interest in girls.

Is Sven a byproduct of contemporary society? After all, as consumers, don't we always demand fresh and young looking top-models? Isn't anorexia in young women a way to avoid the aging process (through starvation the menstruation cycle stops, thus creating in anorexic girls a false sense of childhood)? Don't we value youth to the extreme? Are we not obsessed with exercise and lifting and botox and so on so that we may never look old? I cannot answer these questions but I can suggest something: today age is an anathema.

Sven is about to reach the threshold of adulthood but he refuses to cross it. Like an anorexic girl, he lingers to childhood: he shaves his legs and armpits; he desperately tries to get rid of the evidence of time, of age. When he admits to his progenitor that he has no interest in turning 18, the man emphasizes that he, as a father, wants him to turn 18. It is the desire of the other.

But why is this important? Jacques Lacan explains that desire is psychically invested in an "object a" (Objet Petit). The function of the 'object a' goes through a phantasm, id est, a Phantasmatic dynamic that reinforces fantasy (this includes not only sexual fantasies but all sorts of fantasy as well).

The encounter of the subject with the other's desire is a traumatic event; that other is structurally incapable of guaranteeing Jouissance. The Jouissance ignites the construction of the phantasm as a veil that hides what the 'other' lacks. Nevertheless, desire is intersubjective, which means that there is a need for the other.

There is a scene in Gay's Krampack in which two boys discuss the possibility of engaging in sexual intercourse with two girls. One of them says that they shouldn't do anything because the girls have not reached the age of majority and the other one replies that neither have they (quick translation): "we're underage too, that means we can have sex with whomever we want". Sheer adolescent naiveté or plain hormonal horniness? In the film, Patrick, a younger boy, gets very close to Sven. In fact, in some moments, Patrick seeks him out fully aware of the possible risks. Is there a gray area here? If the offender is underage… doesn't that become an extenuating circumstance? Does the nature of crime depend only on jurisdiction? Patrick publicly accuses Sven of "crossing a line" in one occasion, only to knock at his door on the next one.

Is Patrick the Objet Petit? If the 'Object a' is absent it reinforces the function of the signifier (without absence there would be no signifier); on the other hand, if the object a's presence is real then anxiety ensues. Lacking a place in the symbolic, the object a manifests in structural fissures, always within a phantasmatic code. That's why Sven gets nervous when Patrick is around and tells him to go away, only to feel saddened by his absence afterwards. Paraphrasing Lillian Ferrari's interpretation of Lacan if one considers the real as object a, then we're talking about a remainder that escapes symbolization, and as such an element heterogeneous to the signifier (which belongs to the subjective structure). The question of the other's desire is inextricably linked to its ethical dimension insofar as the object a bears the possibility of alterity, of real otherness. When Sven finds himself exscinded is because there is no place for him in the symbolic order, id est, in society. But at the same time, the elusive nature of the object a forces him to continually prey on young boys, until only one outcome is possible.

Competent execution on complicated subject

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 17 May 2017]

"Guter Junge" or "A Good Boy" is a German 90-minute movie from 2008, so this one will have its 10th anniversary next year. Director is the (then already) prolific Torsten C. Fischer. But even more importantly, the writer is Karl-Heinz Käfer and I am shocked to see that he has hardly written any scripts at all for movies despite his age because I believe he did a marvelous job here and his screenplay is the heart and soul of the film. Besides lead actor Klaus J. Behrendt of course, who gives a contender for career-best performance here and I believe he is wasted probably on a crappy show like Tatort. He sure has the talent for much better stuff. Nice to see him receive some awards recognition for what he did in here.

This is the story of what happens when children turn into child abusers themselves and how it is extremely complicated for those around them to do the right thing in this complicated situation. What is one of my favorite aspects here about it all is definitely how the offenders are also depicted of their inner selves and we see how they are trying to fight their inner demons, but frequently they just cannot do anything against them because of how strong they are. This small screen release is a prime example how television may not be on the same level as it is in the United States, but if you look closely enough you will find a gem here and there. It's probably closer to a ****/***** than to a **/***** for Behrendt's performance alone already. Cannot say I am a great fan or Urzendowsky at all and he has films where he really sucks, but here he is okay enough to not destroy the movie and luckily he is not having an affair again with a much older woman. Anyway, this film certainly gets a thumbs-up from me and I (highly) recommend checking it out. It feels authentic, it is touching and the script as well as performances are all convincing. All you can hope for. Go see it.