The Wild Boys

Bertrand Mandico’s uninhibited, erotically-charged gender-bending romp The Wild Boys is a pleasingly surreal ride, but its sexual politics leave something to be desired

Film Review by Kelli Weston | 10 Sep 2018
Film title: The Wild Boys
Director: Bertrand Mandico
Starring: Pauline Lorillard, Vimala Pons, Diane Rouxel, Anaël Snoek, Mathilde Warnier
Release date: 14 Sep

The Wild Boys (Les Garçons Sauvages), the debut feature from French director Bertrand Mandico, is a bizarre, uninhibited, erotically-charged gender-bending romp. It's a stylistically arresting excursion into the surreal, but somewhat wobbly in its politics.

In the supposed grip of some Dionysus-like deity or passion, which (or whom) they call ‘Trevor,’ a group of French schoolboys – all of them curiously and winsomely androgynous – sexually assault their literature teacher (Nathalie Richard). Shortly thereafter they are shipped off to sea under the supervision of an enigmatic sailor, ominously deemed The Captain (Sam Louwyck), who promises to tame the unruly youths. Once aboard, the boys toil away and plot a mutiny, but The Captain has already begun to cripple their group dynamic and weans them on a strict diet of mysterious hairy fruit. Things only grow more eccentric when they land on a lush, especially ‘fertile’ island: trees, for example, covered in penis-shaped appendanges squirt a milky substance the boys describe as ‘divine.’

The Wild Boys makes for a richly literary film, with obvious references to Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, and even Pinocchio. It’s an aesthethically assured debut, one that unfolds almost entirely in black and white with occasional, welcome bursts of colour (in particular, an exquisitely shot orgy on the beach). Mandico had already established himself with a number of well-received shorts where he first cultivated his unique style, but this film – an achievement in experimental storytelling, to be sure – doesn’t always hold up under closer scrutiny.

It should be noted that the schoolboys are all played by young women, and without giving too much away, for all its gender-defying ambitions, the film falls into some peculiar gendered conventions. If masculinity is all raging sexuality – its consequences never fully grappled with here – then femininity brings with it a kind of sexless serenity; they are sexualised, but not necessarily sexual. A more complex and much-needed interrogation of gender and sexuality would have made this truly stunning film a great one.


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