78. Mektoub My Love; movie review

MEKTOUB MY LOVE
Cert 15
181 mins
BBFC advice: Contains strong sex, nudity

Remember those endless summers by the sea where carefree handsome lads circled around beautiful girls with boobs and bums overflowing from teenie-weenie bikinis?
Nah, me neither.
I do recall the magnificent summer of 1976 when my next-door neighbour and I discovered girls in Weston-super-Mare - at the age of 13.
And I had a holiday romance when I was 15 on the Isle of Wight which led to a five-year relationship.
Therefore, Mektoub My Love stuck a very slight chord.
Oh, and I recognised how beautiful young women fall for bad lads. I saw that repeated over and over in my time as a student.
If I had only shaved my scrawny ginger beard and dispensed with the blue anorak, they might have fallen for me!
These minor chimes were hardly worth three hours of Abdellatif Kechich's lens leering over the curves of some very attractive young women while lecherous men try their chances.
Mektoub My Love feels like a huge self-indulgence because it is so unrealistic.
No seaside towns are so perfect, no weather is consistently so glorious and no group of friends and even their older relatives are all so beautiful.
Indeed, the point which struck me about the cast was their teeth. Were they auditioned on the quality of their pearly white smiles?
Shaïn Boumedine is the main subject of the film - a young man who is on holiday from studying and working in Paris.
He is very handsome but lacks the gift of the gab of his friends and so can't espouse his true feelings for the lovely Ophélie (Ophélie Bau).
He's not even put off by seeing her get up to some sweaty rumpy-pumpy with his older cousin, Tony (Salim Kechiouche), - the local lothario who charms all the women into bed.
Indeed, he also lures tourist Charlotte (Alexia Chardard) with his good looks and compliments and she makes the mistake of falling in love.
And then there is more flirting, more behind-the-back assessing of morals and a sheep giving birth.
For three hours!
Mektoub My Love looks good and might have worked if it hadn't gone on for so long but I needed so much stamina to reach its end, I felt as if I deserved sponsorship.

Reasons to watch: Conjures memories of summer in youth
Reasons to avoid: Goes on and on and on

Laughs: None
Jumps: None
Vomit: None
Nudity: Yes
Overall rating: 5/10

Did you know? Latest figures show that 668,668 Tunisians live in France - over 500,000 more than the nearest next country of emigration, Italy.

The final word. Abdellatif Kechich: "What touched me in Bégaudeau's novel is the atmosphere of summer, holidays, the hesitation of desires and feelings."

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