North Sea Texas (2011)

I knew nothing about this film when I decided to check it out. The main character, a teenage boy Pim, lives with his single mother and older brother by the sea. He spends much of his time at his neighbor's house and slowly and gradually an attraction develops between Pim and the neighbor boy. Pim is a person a few words, as are several of the film's characters. I enjoyed watching the new and budding relationship between Pim and the neighbor boy, which they are of course compelled to keep hidden. Their relationship has its ups and downs but it always felt genuine to me. It is also short on dialogue, which I liked and did not see as a detriment but rather strengthened the films emotional impact. There were a few uneven/oddly handled sequences, small and short they were, but not enough to prevent me from ultimately enjoying this film experience.

First read jm10701 review of this movie! This reviewer draws a nice clear picture of the characters and plot in this odd Belgium indie film. At the beginning I was not compelled to watch this movie due to the weird little boy but I stuck with it and I'm glad I did.Pim (the main character) is so sullen you'll wonder what's to become of him as his mother expresses no parenting skills and the only positive influences in his life seem to be the mother of his friend Gino and Pim's own imagination. So you just might want to follow Pim's story into his adolescence. (He has a catharsis moment alone on the beach in which he transitions into adulthood) There are other reviews here that are more detailed and repeating their praise is pointless.The photography is wonderful, the mood of desperation is consistent, Pim's mother is a dead ringer for a 'Divine' look-a-like contest, and her boyfriend Etienne is as sleazy as he looks.

After finding this movie on complete accident through IMDb's "People who liked this also liked…" thing, I figured I'd give this film a shot. I thought it looked decent, nothing amazing, so I didn't go in with amazingly high expectations or anything. I'm sad to say the film couldn't live up to my rather low expectations. All I really wanted from this movie was for it to present with me a teenage boy who I could sympathize with. I didn't even really need a strong, relatable character. Just someone I could feel for. I didn't get that. The main character, and everyone else for that matter, was so bland and emotionless. He looked like he didn't want to be on set. It made it kind of difficult to really care about what was happening. In the end, the movie just turned out rather boring, unfortunately.

Director Bavo Defurne has had a pretty successful career in writing, directing, and producing short films with the kind of active cinematography and intimacy his first feature film North Sea Texas has. Defurne's deep, often unblinking look at his subjects provide us with a truly stark look at their life, and by the end, even if the short was just ten or fifteen minutes long, we achieved an understanding with his characters and his motives became clear. Of course I'm talking about "Campfire," the short he's most regarded for. And let me say, North Sea Texas is no "Campfire." The story concerns a fourteen-year-old named Pim (Jelle Florizoone), who lives in the West Flemish area of France, circa 1970. His father is no longer alive, so his mother Yvette (Eva Van der Gucht) always seems to be in some sort of relationship. A neglected and unnoticed Pim begins to develop feelings for his seventeen-year-old neighbor, Gino (Mathias Vergels), which quickly turn sexual in the wake of Gino moving away with his girlfriend. It just so happens that Pim leaves his mother to live with other relatives and be closer with Gino and his ultimate goal is to try and make their star-crossed relationship work in the long run.Coming-out cinema is beginning to grind not only its own gears together, making for many awkward, too little too late films, but my own personal ones too. Just having gay characters and a gay love story doesn't make a film edgy, exciting, or visceral on its own merits. There needs to be more human interest in the story and, unfortunately, this is greatly lacking here. For starters, there are too many characters. There's no real reason why the mother needed to have a boyfriend in the first place and there's no true reason why Pim had to go live with his relatives anyway. The film could've easily shown him as a neglected boy just because his mother and him were growing distant with each other.Second, the film inhabits the increasingly tedious style of "less-is-more," minimalist filmmaking, which, for this type of story, simply does not work here. It's distracting and makes the film appear inherently vapid of content and story. There are too many scenes of extended periods of silence and too little scenes enriching us with these characters. Long silences can work in film if we're given something to contemplate during the time of the silence. All we're given is a very fragile, loose gay relationship between two young boys, and because of the lack of development we haven't become invested enough to truly care or even worried that something may not work out.But it appears I'm being too hard on a film, whose good intentions are noticeable and somewhat credible. Jelle Florizoone is a fine, subtle screen presence, excelling at a role that is certainly brave for his age, and likewise for Mathias Vergels, whose older character has even a little more to thing about than his lover. Quite possibly the most electric scenes in North Sea Texas are when Pim and Gino are confronting their repressed sexual tendencies in a tent in the woods, which involve many intimate sequences and alive emotion. These scenes alone make the film hard to dislike in many ways.Yet the problems in North Sea Texas are a bit too big to ignore. There's careful directing, beautiful cinematography (if we're comparing it to other works of queer cinema, it's about half as good as the kind we see in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain), and bold performances, but there's also methodical writing, too many characters, slow progression, and an achingly minimalist style present. All I can hope is that one day, the youth of France get a gay movie that could very well represent their culture in a more intricate, sophisticated way.Starring: Jelle Florizoone, Mathias Vergels, Eva van der Gucht, Katelijne Damen, and Noor Ben Taouet. Directed by: Bavo Defurne.