Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2017) User Reviews

Needlessly eroticized coming-of-age story

[canozer123 · 7/10 · 13 August 2018]

This is a film that's hard to review; it is technically well done, but once in a while you wonder why you are watching what you're watching.

The film offers many ingredients of a good coming-of-age story: realistic characters, realistic character developments, realistic scenarios, realistic dialogues. Its perspective is not moralistic; It neither blames nor encourages any of its characters' different approaches to sex and life.

The problem, however, is that if you cut one hour of the movie out, it wouldn't lose any significance. Indeed, a lot of the film is plain gazing at the plump bodies of women, but the thing is that the gazed body parts do not add anything to the film. One could argue that the long sex scene in La Vie d'Adele gave the viewer an opportunity to get acquainted with the characters since the way a person has sex also tells a lot about them. The same argument sadly cannot be given in this film. Hence, you have a three hour long movie instead of two. Nonetheless, the longevity of the film does not mean that the film is stretched out. Three hours pass by in a relatively quick fashion (especially if you like women).

I just hope women and the animals in the movie did not have to endure shootings that they didn't particularly enjoy, considering Léa Seydoux's and Adele Exarchopoulos's harsh comments on the director at the time.

Too loud, too bright - and *definitely* too long

[euroGary · 5/10 · 19 February 2019]

Amin quits his Paris medical school and returns to his seaside home town, intent on pursuing his twin interests of photography and writing sci-fi scrips. He quickly discovers that his womanising brother Tony (Salim Kechiouche, more famous to British audiences for such gay-friendly fare as 'Grande École' and 'Le Clan') is having an affair with his pultridudinous childhood friend Ophélie. Amin and Tony visit the beach, where they meet two tourists, Charlotte and Céline. Charlotte quickly falls for Tony's swarthy charms, and Céline initially seems interested in Amin - before showing equal interest in his humorous friend Joe and, indeed, in Ophélie.

On paper, this soapy storyline looks as if it could be dealt with relatively quickly. Director/co-writer Abdellatif Kechiche, however, spins it out to a squirm-inducing 181 minutes. He does this mainly by lengthening scenes way beyond their ability to hold the viewer's attention: for example, a nightclub sequence which adds nothing to the development of either plot or character lasts, by my reckoning, at least quarter of an hour but could have finished in half that time; and to establish that Ophélie works on a goat farm all that was needed was for her to say "I've got to get to the goat farm"; instead we're treated to five minutes of her herding the creatures into a barn.

Kechiche frequently has his actors talking over one another, which may be an accurate mirror of real-life conversation, but makes it difficult for the viewer to keep track of who is saying what, particularly when reading sub-titles. He also often places his actors in front of the sun, casting them into shadow and searing the eyeballs of his audience.

This film is sub-titled 'Canto Uno', which suggests one or more sequels. Even though the characters are largely likeable, and there is comfort in the predictability of the story, unless those sequels benefit from much tighter editing than did this, I won't be going anywhere near them.

Too long for nothing

[pariisaap · 5/10 · 14 July 2021]

It could be an hour instead of a 3 hours movie it spend half an hour to show a sheep born or 20 minutes to watch people dance in a bar.the movie trying hard to show all the girls like Amin. The lovely boy that I think he wasn't as lovely as what they think.

East meets West in common places

[sorin-hadarca-140-298258 · 7/10 · 26 September 2018]

Basically, lots of flesh. Scandalous, considering the action takes places in a muslim country, but the waves of visiting tourists makes flirt & nudity an everyday business. Amin's gaze is of an non-judgmental observer, reluctunt to engage. Love has little to do with the place, except for the lambs maybe - a cliche for innocence. Op-ending, the movie (hardly a story) lacks a morale; sometimes life is such.

Kechiche best film so far: Sea, sex and sun.

[fschmiliver · 10/10 · 15 October 2018]

'Mektoub my love Canto Uno' has devided professional critics.

It is easy to denounce its lack of former plot line, length (3hrs) and voyeurism. Although these accusations are valid, who let himself completely immerse into it will feel undoubtedly rewarded.

It is not a boring film and quite captivating actually. I was even craving for more..

The action takes place in Sète, a southern France resort town on the Mediterranean. Amin, a shy student of Tunisian background who came back to his home town for summer, hangs out with friends and girls on holidays. Bodies and characters faces are shot with the delightful summer light which gives an extra touch of sensuality to the whole story.

The film shows like no other movie before it what it really feels to be young, beautiful and on holidays. The camera is so close from the group that the viewer feels actually part of the band.

It can work as a time machine (for the ones who have enjoyed similar experiences) or better as a machine that sucks you into the present, a call that is so powerful that one can hardly get out of it unharmed.

Kechiche's tour de force is to create a fiction that feels so real it could be a documentary on sociability, family, seduction and love at 20 something.

For the viewer who has let go and enjoyed this piece of cinema at his true value it is hard not to regard 'Mektoub my love' as an original, authentic, peculiar masterpiece.

French bech summer

[LUIS · 7/10 · 31 May 2020]

In this French beach summer we start from a dull and timid protagonist who only smiles and talks

A fake director using fake codes to make a fake movie

[nilcaron · 1/10 · 1 March 2019]

This is ridiculously bad, he tries to give his self a style when he doesnt have any, he is the definition of a wannabe.

The vulgar way of filming, the emptyness of the subject, the boring characters and actors and his way of trying to be special and arty is just making me want to scream out about his poorness, thinking how can people fall into such an obvious trap, do peoplejust follow the « fashion » like sheeps, dont they have the capacity of telling this movie is empty?

He is trying to capture instants of life, as Jim Jarmusch for example can do in a brillant and very intelligent way, but here it is simply EMPTY completely boring, nothing interesting nothing that sounds real or fun, simply emptyness.

I could only think to myself during the whole movie, did he really chose this job to only be able to hangout with sexy girls and get to know them, the only motivation he has by being a « director » is to have power over those girls. That is the only thing i come out with after 3hours of deep boringness, how can he find producers after this seriously i dont know, people might be forgetting what cinema is about.

Avoid anything that has to deal with this director, he is an imposter.

Khechiche's awakening of desire

[matlabaraque · 9/10 · 13 November 2020]

I am surprised with the marks given by Imdb's users. Three years after seeing this film I still think about it, its music, its caracters, its mood accompany me. Mektoub My Love is a great movie, maybe not a masterpiece you would re-watch on an on but it's a great film, with a proper mood and a sensitive artistic touch. Among other things, it features a great sensuality and some brilliant actors (most of them are beginners and turn out to be really good especially Ophelie Bau who delivers a promising performance). Abdellatif Khechiche has this capacity to take the best out of his actors, he is also capable of captivating and bewitching his audience in a multi sensory journey. Khechiche does not make entertainment, it's not an action movie you should be looking for, it's a travel into his adolescence in the South of France, an ode to the youth, the non-endind summer and the awakening of desire. I think this film, a bit like "La graine et le mulet" which also took place in Sète (France), is very personal for the director. In fact, the heroe, Amin, looks like Abdelatif Khechiche himself (a young French man with arab origins who studies cinema...), the seaside resort he depicts really exists and you can't help thinking he's put some of his personal affairs in this story. What is interesting in Khechiche's cinema is how he shows the awakening of desire and the aesthetics chosen. I believe critics define it as naturalist cinema, a cinema that focuses on the flesh, the bodies, the lips sometimes even the driblle with an unmissable focus on the curves of women ; it's a cinema with a strong eroticization of the body but it's also a cinema that requires time, some scenes can be very long and Khechiche does it on purpose to insist on the desire felt, the games of seduction or to insist on the lenght of the night. Mektoub my love is a brilliant example of what Khechiche does best in that sense. Along with all that, the film features a social accuracy that gives a true insight to the film. It's not only about the birth of desire at the age of 20, it's also about a certain category of youth and summer loves. His cinema is always very realistic, you can feel the mood of a seaside resort, you understand its youth, its seduction games and you feel so comfortable that you would appreciate being part of the film actually. Like in "La vie d'Adèle", Khechiche goes very far into the eroticization of the bodies and the scenes at the beach (so beautiful...all of them), in the night club (slightly long I admitt) and the never ending approches between young adults reflect so well his cinema and the theme chosen : the birth of desire and sexuality at a young age. If you take your time (I think it's the key) and let you drift by Khechiche's poetry, you will certainly fall in love and enjoy being young (again) for the length of the movie.

Song

[shahabasadii · 7/10 · 2 July 2021]

Hello Does anyone know the name of the song at the beginning of the movie?

Trivial intellectuality or intellectualized trivialities?

[norbert-plan-618-715813 · 4/10 · 12 June 2022]

In fact Abdellatif Kechiche dreams of making a series. The length of his films is justified by his desire to make a documentary on the social engineering between these characters on the Mediterranean coast who spend their time talking to say nothing. Each scene is treated as a piece of bravura, as a montage sequence with a multitude of details and interactions between characters who have nothing to say to each other. That is to say, Kechiche's camera wants to be at the center of the people, at the center of their interactions, like a documentary, to reflect a reality, which is very positive here, and the film is extremely brilliant in terms of staging, or rather capturing the scenes. But each of these montage sequences would have been treated in a very different way by many filmmakers with multiple ellipses or not shown at all.

Moreover, Abdellatif Kechiche's other passion is to show women's bodies, especially their asses and breasts. It is not unpleasant, because the film is very naturalistic on this subject. It must be admitted that these characters are not exciting and that is the limit of the film. Stretching out these character interactions over 180 minutes would have been much better as a series in, say, twenty-minute modules, with each scene lasting twenty minutes; and the series format would add even more.

It's brilliant in terms of direction. But boring on the diegetic level. The evolutions of the main character touch us weakly.

Nostalgia sunset

[nicodbsn · 9/10 · 29 December 2019]

Kechiche intuitively knows how to film bodies and the souls that drive them. It's an organic cinema, distilled in the most nostalic and melancholic barrel. We're all trapped on that beach, surrounded by love on a warm summer afternoon.

Always.

Garbage served in the name of art

[tulsi-das-khan · 1/10 · 22 June 2021]

Abdellatif Kechiche is one of those pseudo intellectual directors. Filming with a shaky camera, hovering the lens over the characters to give the viewers an insight into their predicaments, needlessly, poorly written dialogues which add nothing to the movie DOES NOT make a movie artistic.

Unrequited love, for now....

[Saxonanglo · 8/10 · 15 April 2020]

In many ways this is a beautiful film primarily because of the beautiful actresses and setting and the relaxed nature of the film. Unlike others I found that there was an underlying love story hidden in the film. There was also an underlying misogyny with fathers openly hitting on the young women which gave the film a dark side which was at times uncomfortable. Amin returns from university in Paris during the summer holidays to find Orphelie, the object of his desires, having sex with his cousin Tony, a very unsavoury character. It is apparent that Orphelie's fiancée, Clement, who is away on assignment with the French navy, trusts Amin but not Tony. The film concentrates for a lot of the time on the relaxed and loving relationship between Amin and Orphelie. It is obvious that they are made for each other. Whilst having many opportunities to have romances with the other girls in the film Amin is polite but obviously not interested. Near the end there is a nightclub scene where he only has eyes for Orphelie even though the gorgeous Celine and others obviously want him. In the end he befriends Charlotte, an Orphelie lookalike, who has had her heart broken by Tony. Where this may lead we may never find out.

French-Tunisian Rohmer mayhaps?

[anxiousgayhorseonketamine · 8/10 · 18 February 2020]

Hmmm so here we have a man called Abdellatif making a film in which Tunisians and French Arabs have a field day with the local lasses in Sète the hometown of Paul Valéry; and the local lasses cannot get enough ; kinda "She gotta have it" on the Med.

hmmm now I am well aware that there is a sequel already out titled Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo but and I have a suggestion for a third: hear me out ...

How about Jean-Pierre & Jean-Michel both of them cousins have a field day in Tunis; it could start with a steamy no-holds barred sex scene lasting over 6 minutes in which Noura rides Jean-Pierre in total abandon; the filmmaker making sure there is no corner of Noura we do not enjoy as a visual offering ... simply to match the opening scene of Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno

But even not being a qualified seer I do not think this film is in the pipeline. We wonder why. So this irks throughout the entire 3 hours and will carry on irking.

And for the aforementioned reasons I really wanted to dislike this film even hate it.

BUT I simply had to get over myself as Abdellatif Kechiche here shows himself to be capable of quasi-Rohmerian skills of storytelling ... so the characters are a bit vapid mostly middle-class students; drifting; the main character did a year of Medicine in Paris but is now back at mum's whiling away the summer ... so here we are within all the Rohmerian perimeters; folks vaguely in love with folks; indecision; air-headedness; open-endedness; looseness; detachment even; and Abdellatif Kechiche does all this very well indeed

He can be accused of voyeurism here and there is plenty of that; main actress Ophélie Bau has been named promising new actress; one could be concerned that with a gambit of that nature there is little she could now "artistically" offer the viewer of following flix but time will tell.

It is in the final analysis an ode to sensuality and the female form and ode to pleasure and The Med; it seems the director has a keen eye for the female form with a propensity to let the camera drift to the derriere of his acting ladies; so all cross-cultural shenanigans put aside it is quite a successful work ... see what you think ...

Beautiful insight into Arab community in France at seaside

[dragannj · 9/10 · 27 September 2023]

Women dialogs in this movie are very interesting, because they have too pretend that they don't know what is going on with the main femail character in this movie and her love life, and still make effort to change it, for her sake.

Only thing missing is some kind of resolution with main character, but maybe sequel would cover it.

A lot of different characters are shown, and the way they entertain themselves.

For me, the movie is realistically showing of people's lives, and that is most important when I watch movies. Therefore something can be learned from it. Also it was enjoyable to watch.