The unforgiving landscape of the snow-capped Pyrenees sets the stage for this coming of age film of frustrated homosexual love. It is a tale of two high school outsiders at odds with one another. One, - a mountain lion of a farmer's son - effortlessly scales the peaks of his alpine territory and bathes nude in a winter's lake. The other sensitive boy belongs to a doctor's family and recites verses by Rimbaud. Their encounters are as cold and brutal as the climate. Until, suddenly, a different kind of passion emerges.
Being 17 is the latest feature by André Téchiné, and it represents something of a culmination and reworking of a set of the director's thematic obsessions. Its narrative content recalls his highly acclaimed Wild Reeds, a story of burgeoning sexuality placed in the same region of France during the period of the Algerian War. The war has changed in Being 17, with a military father participating in French army field operations in the Middle East. But the confrontation between homosexual desire and expectations governing masculine behavior, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulty of accomplishing those vast steps from adolescence to adulthood persist.
And such a spring awakening is visually framed as gorgeously as it ever has been. The Pyrenees loom large and snowflakes pierce the eye in crisp digital cinematography. Viewers are immersed in the inhospitable terrain just as they are witnesses to farm life, shared moments of intimacy between distant parents, and the embarrassments of the classroom. Spectacles of masculine aggression make way to reconciliation.
The performances of the three leads are quite strong, bringing depth and credibility to the characters. This verisimilitude in characterization is essential to the film’s success, as the story must negotiate an impossible line between optimistic outcomes for young gay love and more sobering clichéd ends. French critics, in fact, derided the film for having a predictable ending predetermined by the conflict between the young men. (The punishing high school that Téchiné so often represents has ingrained the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in them, after all). But students of the director’s filmography will notice that the film’s ending suggests that much has changed for gay life during the course of the director’s lifetime.
Being 17 is compelling thanks to story, acting, camera, and direction coming together to draw us into an engaging world of precarious feelings and intimacy. Incidentally, it also artfully introduces us to a culture that has opened itself to different forms of love. Even in its most remote outposts.
