Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo

Abdellatif Kechiche certainly doesn’t bow to pressure. After his purportedly candid portrait of lesbian sexuality in the Palme d’Or-winning La vie d’Adèle (2013) was accused of representing but a thinly veiled masturbatory fantasy, he doubled down with Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2017), a rhapsodic, unabashedly hormonal chronicle of youths in heat. After that film’s detractors complained about the slender narrative and attacked him for leering at women’s posteriors, and its champions generally agreed that the film’s overlong club scene was a weak point, he returns with Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, which has even less plot, even more ass, and spends three of its three-and-a-half hours in that same club. As his compatriots would say, il a du culot—with special emphasis on the cul.

I promise to can hardly avoid the subject. The short prelude, of the protagonist Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) taking nude pictures of his friend Ophélie (Ophélie Bau), ends with the camera slithering down her back and coming to rest on a close-up of her sun-dappled cheeks. The equally brief coda opens on a tableau of a naked girl in bed, shot from the legs up in a prone variant of Courbet’s . The booty shots in between are too numerous to count. Of course, without horny artists the world would be a much poorer place, but the contrast between and is instructive.