The latest drama from French collaborators Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (The Adventures of Felix) is an intensely flavoured slice of life, salty-sweet, rich with feeling.
It offers 97 compact minutes that unfold in real time, starting from the moments when the title characters (Geoffrey Couët and François Nambot, respectively) meet in a gay sex club and get it on in explicit, unfaked detail. But when it turns out one of them is HIV positive, that sweaty bout of unprotected sex changes everything, prompting a trip to the hospital and a great deal of soul searching as they traverse the city, getting to know each other.
Cineastes will see parallels with Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset among other films (the original French tile, Theo & Hugo dans le meme bateau, tips its hat to Jacques Rivette), but the film has its own specific vibe, thanks in part to the writer-directors’ unique, immersive sense of the milieu and the leads’ tender chemistry. Inky shots of Paris with neon lights reflected in puddles are glittery bonus feature.
