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Poison Friends review
:. Director: Emmanuel Bourdieu
:. Starring: Malik Zidi, Thibault Vincon
:. Running Time: 1:40
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: France
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"Why do some write? Because they don't have enough character not to do it." This Karl Kraus quote is used as a leitmotiv in Emmanuel Bourdieu's second full-length film, the story of a micro-society formed by Parisian literature students and dominated by the most brilliant and charismatic of them all. But this assertion above all applies to the decisions and life choices made at the end adolescence. A work that plays the psychology card, Poison Friends at first disconcerts before seducing by taking the path of suspense.
Two students who meet in literature class fall under the spell of André, who concurrently plays the roles of friend, mentor and advisor. In a long first half, Bourdieu's film flaunts its literary erudition through the influence which André exerts on his classmates. Quotations, theories on the act of writing and creation, philosophy, this Parisian intellectualism is quite annoying but allows André's ambiguous personality to appear.
When we learn in the second half of the film that his charisma is built on a lie, the film deploys all of his qualities and out emerges the true personality of this romantic hero, in the cursed sense of the term. The literary context from the beginning then seems like pure pretext to study the force of the relationships between the characters. When the classmates he tries to humiliate with crushing condescension begin to blossom, first one in theatre, then the other in the literary world (through the publication of a first novel), he loses all of his arrogance. In that, Poison Friends is a vampire movie. The energy used to tyrannize his classmates nourishes them and at the same time empties André of his creative potential. Served by young promising actors, Poison Friends is above all worthy for its central character, tinged with fragility behind the façade of charisma.
Moland Fengkov
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