Garcon Stupide:Genuine Performances Heat Up Swiss Character Study

The new Swiss film Garçon Stupide is about overindulgence in the meaningless things in life, while denying oneself everything important and human about us. Loic (Pierre Chatagny) is a very attractive, but not particularly book-smart bisexual man who lives with Marie (Natacha Koutchoumov), a graduate student who works at a natural history museum.

The two have an open relationship that seems to allow her an occasional date with another man and Loic a plethora of indiscriminate encounters with an endless sea of random men he meets on the Internet, in bars, on the street, etc.

His relationship with Marie is complicated, but director Lionel Baier never really goes there with his story. The film is really about Loic's journey away from her. One day, he is unexpectedly befriended by one of the respondents to an Internet personal ad, Lionel, played by Baier - a significant point, we'll return to in a moment. Ironically, it is these two people, the ones with whom Loic is most intimate, that he never seems to have sex with.

One of the things that makes the film so engaging is the realism of the characters' interactions. This is no doubt due to Baier's writing and directing methods which incorporated his own life experiences, entirely fictional sequences, and most notably, the experiences and writing of the lead actor, Chatagny. Having Chatagny, a non-actor, play what is essentially a dramatized version of himself lends an authenticity that would be hard to duplicate, even if he were a real actor.

Also, as I mentioned, Baier plays a character with the same name, Lionel. In a sense, he is playing himself, too, a voyeuristic onlooker, continually questioning Loic about this choices, his thoughts, and his dreams. It's what a writer or director does with his/her characters off-screen anyway. Here, it is an interesting device and a sort of comment on filmmaking as inherently voyeuristic, especially since we barely see Lionel at all.

Also significant is Baier's choice to shoot the film on videotape, which is a strong contributor to "Garçon" 's depersonalized, yet claustrophobic feeling. Lots of intense close-ups of Loic's face, male body parts in split screen with similar factory machines, and the sterile color that comes naturally with video push the idea of Loic's emptiness to the limits.

The performances are excellent in the film, and for the most part, is a well-composed character study. But in the final half hour of the film, a rapid succession of events occurs that serves to bring the film to a narrative conclusion, but which also betray the intense psychological precedent set out in the majority of the film.

For some, the extremely graphic portrayals of Loic's promiscuity will also be hard to get past, especially since they occur pretty excessively in the first third of the film. But the accumulation of those shallow sexual encounters serve to numb us to them eventually. And after that point, we've built a relationship with Loic that keeps us watching.

It is the genuineness of the performances and of the bulk of the script that make Garçon Stupide, an interesting portrait of a young man discovering who he is and who he really wants to be.