Am I Missing Something?

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The movie is as stereotypical as it can be. The characters are plain and predictable. I feel as if the movie was a the-dreamers-wanna-be, given that they were trying to portray liberal characters such as Agnès and trying to be philosophical at the same time, but they did not succeed. I lost track of the movie halfway. I don't know if it was only me, but the three roommates looked very alike and I still confused them at the end of the movie. Definitely not worth my time. I gave it three stars because there were some scenes that were good: passionate and lustful. I liked, however, the way they criticized the educational system in France and the social class division, aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

This film was nothing more than exploitative gay cheesecake. It was not an "art" movie; just an excuse to show several gratuitous, exploitative, over-the-top scenes with extensive male genital nudity. There was a locker room scene involving over a dozen naked men. The camera zooms in on the men's asses and penises as they are portrayed for several minutes with their dicks in full screen view. There are several scenes in this film showing penis after penis. It gets redundant REAL fast and makes it impossible to take this film seriously. I was wondering if I was watching a Playgirl video by mistake. If these same scenes were filmed using women (ex: totally naked and showing their vaginas repeatedly) it would be quickly dismissed as just softcore porn and an excuse to show a lot of eye candy...which is all that this film is. Any artistic merit got flushed down the drain of the gay ghetto mentality. The themes of class distinction, homosexuality, longing-desire, etc. were simple and superficial; no more developed than what one would expect from a first year philosophy student. Just cut to the chase and rent a gay porn instead.

There's a touch of Rohmer in "Grande Ecole". Characters, set in unglamorous, surburban spaces, are just a little too intent and penetrating to be real. Their emotions are simple, yet surprisingly delicate. They experience no jealousy or revenge, but desire, self-doubt and tenderness. Like Rohmer's, Salis' movies feel too nostalgic and sweet to be topical, and that aestheticism is put to the use of tolerance and humanism. Sex scenes for example are remarkable. Homo- and heterosexual love become comparable because Salis makes caressing and enticing the cornerstone of every sexual encounter. The movie however becomes overtly theatrical towards the end, and does not tune in with the closure that Rohmer would have gone for. Salis resolves conflicts, by now difficult to disentangle, only by confusing the viewer to a point of no return and settling for the beauty of seeing all characters reunited finally, if not in the movie, at least on the screen: him and her, and him and her, and him.

The title translates to "The Best of Schools," the school of life. This film really makes me wish I was fluent in French, including idioms and nuances that must be flowing every moment. Subtitles just can't cut it. But there's a great line in the film, which translates pretty well, I think: "You don't get it at all. Hetero, homo, all that's finished. It's outdated and it doesn't matter." In the "Making of..." feature, the director (Robert Salis) says, "...the theme is based on the notion of choice, or, actually, the disobeying of imposed choices...." and "crisscross desire" (which he insists is not the same as sex). He also said, "...it's like a dresser with drawers on top of one another. To find out the complete contents you have to open the drawers separately one after another." He does just that very skillfully.Needless to say, it's a complex film, with happy parts, sad parts, sex galore (men with women, and a man with a man), sexy men showing full frontal nudity, and all that. About halfway through, it felt exactly like "Maurice," (and Salis even mentioned that film in the "Making of..."), but then it changed to something totally different after that. This isn't a Gay film. It's a "men who have sex with men" film. "MSM" is a term sex researchers use because most men would never self-identify as Gay, but usually will privately admit if they've had sex with men.There's a lot more depth, but I'm not going to analyze it to death. Great movie! Watch it. Don't watch the trailer or the "Making of..." or anything else first though.Back to "desire": Salis'closing line in the "Making of..." is, "There's only love and the lack of love. And desire naturally goes hand in hand with the lack and nourishes itself." I think I'll have to watch the movie all over again now to understand that.