Mektoub, My Love
Idle pleasures…
CERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Abdellatif Kechiche STARRING Shaïn Boumedine, Salim Kechiouche, Ophélie Bau SCREENPLAY Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalia Lacroix DISTRIBUTOR Curzon Artificial Eye RUNNING TIME 181 mins Out 15 February
Having decided, in his Palme d’Or-winning previous film, that Blue Is The Warmest Colour, director Abdellatif Kechiche’s follow-up feature offers several new shades for consideration: bronzed skin, sandy beaches and neon-lit nightclubs.
The slim story, set in 1994, charts the return of Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) to his southern French home, where he spies cousin Tony (Salim Kechiouche) in flagrante with childhood friend Ophélie (Ophélie Bau). Since Ophélie wants to keep the affair a secret, Tony is free to see other women. It isn’t long before he’s dragged Amin to the beach to woo a pair of tourists.
Kechiche follows these characters – and their extended friends and families in the town’s mostly Tunisian-French community – in a relay between days relaxing in the sun and nights dancing in bars. Few directors are better at creating epic set-pieces from nothing, and there’s a consistently sensual pleasure to the Bacchanalian
excess. The nearest equivalent is the similarly youthful, freewheeling American Honey, but this lacks that film’s sense of narrative or moral purpose. Amin is a frustratingly passive figure, watching the revelry at one remove, and Kechiche is content to drift with him.
Even at three hours, this story isn’t done, with Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due reportedly due this year. Perhaps the sequel will determine whether there’s anything more to the film’s endless ogling of female skin than directorial voyeurism. Simon Kinnear
tHe veRDICt
Immersive and intoxicating, but you wonder where the time went.