Perfectly adorable

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Let's get something straight: the English translation of the title "Eleve Libre" is very, very wrong. It will confuse the viewer and it does not do justice to this sensitive, well-made, subtle work of art. "Free Student" is a 'mot à mot' translation but, if I invoke the creative goddess, I would be inspired and call the film: "Student with a Choice". The alternatives were always available to this 17 year old "not so keen to study" a talented tennis player who besides school, tennis, friends and family, also has to deal with sex, because nature was calling him to do so. But sex is something our society is NOT taking very seriously, besides saying: Just don't do it, or it is something shameful, dirty and embarrassing. Well, society got these erroneous notions from the old, and misguided religious texts, and most people are stuck with them even today. Sex is life, sex is normal, sex is beautiful and important in this unorthodox, well written, directed and edited film. The film is perfectly paced, it has a pleasant rhythm like a sexual act or better yet, like Ravel's Bolero; it starts slowly and it calmly arrives to a climax just in time for you to have lots of honest and uncommon questions. This film is also utterly sincere, open and nonjudgmental; it makes us uncomfortable, because the approach to life in general is different to what we are accustomed to. If you are not willing to let the wind of the "atypical" caress you, then this film is not for you, but if you are willing to see a group of people struggling with life in a very different way that will create discussion after the credits are rolling, get this gripping and attention-grabbing film. Jonas is an adorable, charming and open-minded talented teenager who is privately tutored not only in math, chemistry and geography but also the art of freethinking, going steady with his girlfriend and the art of sex. In a very crucial moment, his mother comes to visit and asks Jonas if all is well and if there is anything she can do for him, but he assures her that everything is fine and that he likes his private lessons.There are many layers and metaphors in this linear and simple story with extremely complex issues or unspoken topics, such as the sexual awakening of teenagers today. Jonas is quite sure about his sexuality and his attraction to the opposite sex, but open to experimentation with his adult friends when the time is right. In life, how do we know if anything is good or bad, wet or dry, sweet or bitter if one does not try them? Jonas does it and gets his assurance that he is very heterosexual. This crucial scene is handled elegantly by the sensitive, talented director Joachim Lafosse, and well acted by the young protagonist. Some viewers slandered the film, it is understandable, because the subject matter is taboo, and frankly, there is no other film like it. For those who think this work of art is perverted or abusive, I suggest to watch the end of the movie carefully, because the answer to this positive, rare and moving story it's there in the last 2-minutes, in the last 2 cuts of the film.

It is said (and I have noted to be true) that people see in other people, in works of Art etc. or anything subjective, what THEY actually are. They project their own being, or shortcomings or fears or hidden secrets. That the author of the review below attack this sensitive film is such a disproportionately virulent (and plainly erroneous) way has said much more about him as a person than he probably intended to express. And to call a 17 year-old a 'child' (and who is in his full legal right to consent to any relationship he wishes to pursue, protected by the law itself) is so absurd as to suggest the author had a North American education. To see rape, to see perverted seduction in what is most obviously all but that, would be an alarm calm for anyone reading his review on this subtle film. What is sure is that with such a serious imbalance within him to feel the need to explode in this way, I would make sure no one below 18 walk near him. We have many recent examples of those who shouted far above the rest, and ended up being caught with their pants down, and I don't mean figuratively. His review reads like an open book of serious personal issues, as yet unresolved, and if his review serves any purpose it would be to help him seek assistance. More to do with the film now; it is of course slow and bleak like many European films, but like many European films dare to recount real life, real subtleties, real complexities of relationships that much cinema avoids - and that many like the author mentioned above would like to push so deep into (their subconscious) perversion as to ...create a perversion in itself, quite aside from the what the filmmaker made. It somehow makes them feel they have crushed their demon for a while - little to do with a review.

I'm sorry, that the previous critiques on this 2010 French/Belgian movie paint such a dark, horrific and - most of all - wrong picture of it's content and meaning.First off, let's get the plot right: Jonas, a young man around 17/18, lives alone with his brother near the Belgian border of France. His parents separated and his mother moved away and just visits them once ore twice a month. Jonas usually spends most of his time practicing to be a tennis-pro (just to get to a critique formally posted: you can not expect every young French actor to play tennis like a pro, bro) or with Didier, Nathalie and Pierre, friends of his mother, who play in the same tennis-club as Jonas does. As Jonas spends most of his time on the tennis-court, his academical achievements are not quite the top of the crops, actually he already is 3 years older than most of his classmates. Anyway, as most young man at his age, Jonas makes first contact witch sexuality (with a young girl from his school: Delphine) This stirs the interest of Didier, Nathalie and Pierre, who seem to have a very very good relationship with Jonas, as they talk (almost) openly about Jonas' experiences with Delphine.When Jonas isn't allowed to take the regular exams, Pierre offers, to prepare him for a special test to replace it. During this "private lessons" (which by the way is the German title of the movie) Pierre (Nathalie and Didier also) start to get very very VERY close to Jonas in the process of "teaching" him how everything works concerning sex.The movie does not (as previously claimed) deal with a "pedophile pervert" or "mid-thirties giving blow jobs to minors" but with the sometimes thin borders between being helpful, being close and being abused. Joachim Lafosse (the director) depicts in a very distant but still not cold way the subtle changes that lead to... well I don't wanna tell you to much ;-)After I watched the movie, I, personally, asked myself the question: When did this road towards "abuse" start? was it planned by Pierre from the beginning? Or was it Jonas' decision in the end?I think you should get your own answers and watch this astoundingly intense movie, perfectly fitting into the wave of Western-European new-age movies (for example the German movie "Everyone Else")Thanks for readingMaikP.s. : Excuse my weak English, it's actually 2.30am, but I just had to get some things right here ;-)

In hedonistic France this is probably defined as a "family drama", rather as "sexploitation shock-cinema".Thumbs up for French cinema: it has actually managed to devolve from perennial underage-Lolita-seduces-middle-aged-man to middle-aged-man-seduces-boy scripts. Just as you thought decadence in French movies could not possibly get any worse than it's been in recent decades, comes EL, a movie that will have you vomiting for weeks.The basic plot: Jonas, a not-too-bright 16(?) year-old tennis hopeful (how many tennis hopefuls ARE bright?) is sent to the home of Pierre, a middle-aged intellectual wannabe, where Jonas learns maths, history, and how to receive oral sex from people two-to-three times his age.Pierre - the smelly society-loathing anarchist pervert who ogles him at every opportunity and indulges in lame, self-serving philosophical diatribes - quickly introduces two more smelly perverts in Jonas's life: Nathalie and Didier, an open-relationship orgy/swinger couple who treat sex as if it were a used chewing-gum. One look at those three and you'd run. But what does Jonas know about running? After all, he's just a tennis player... Very soon Jonas finds out that maths, history and nihilistic philosophical rants are not at the top of Pierre's passions, but that molesting boys tops all his lists by a long shot. He sneakily prepares Jonas for this delightful adolescence-ruining ordeal by first destroying the boy's relationship with his girlfriend (by having everyone at the dinner table openly snicker at her for her alleged sexual inadequacies), and then getting Didier and Nathalie to prepare Jonas for a world of sexual perversion by giving him oral sex while Jonas, the gullible schmuck that he is, sits there blind-folded, unaware that he's being set up by three very, very smelly perverts for a life of bisexuality involving older men and rather unappealing middle-aged women with big noses.In the end, Jonas predictably starts feeling rather gloomy about having regular catching sex with his 45 year-old pitching male teacher. To cheer Jonas up a bit and perhaps avert a suicide attempt or two, Pierre tells him the movie's final line of dialogue: "I never forced you to do anything you didn't want." That line must be what all pedophiles love to use after desecrating the body of a minor. (Right after "hey, you asked for it!".) Even worse than all the stench-drenched pedophilic shenanigans that transpire in EL is the writer's message to the (young?) viewer to "think for yourself (like Kami says you should)" which invariably means - at least in the context of this degenerate movie - that children are the hope of not just the world, but of all of the world's lusting pedophilic perverts. The movie can even be understood as a guide for emerging pedophiles: it offers useful seduction tips for all those losers who are sexually attracted to children. For example, leave porn tapes lying around the living room, the way Pierre does.Who financed this abhorrent trash? That notorious Dutch pedophile political party? Pierre is supposed to be a former tennis player. However, his skills are on par with the most talentless beginner imaginable. It was like watching a rhino play golf.Why would they cast Jonas, a kid who obviously knows hot to play, along with an "established ex-pro" who obviously can't swing a racket in any useful manner - except to accidentally hit himself over the head with it? Needless to say, the movie is also bad because it contains dozens of drawn-out scenes/moments when everything seems to move in slow motion. Yeah, the century-old affliction of Europe's pretentious "cinema del arte" i.e. junk cinema. "Arteaux means never having to rush, never having to edit the movie to make it compact hence interesting". Did Kami say that? From his grave, perhaps...AVOID.A certain reviewer has posted a comment here with the sole intention of "educating me". (Or so he claims in the laughable email he sent me.) Read his "wonderful" plea for child-molestation: it's poetic almost. And, no, the kid is 16, pal, not 18.To the other reviewer (the one who says "bro"): no, I didn't refer to the kid's tennis-playing abilities being under-par. I was talking about the adult pervert playing like a rank amateur. Read my text properly.