Mjeteconer
Just perfect...
ShangLuda
Admirable film.
Cleveronix
A different way of telling a story
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
DavidW1947
This fllm proves that you need something more than 'Scope and colour to make a film watchable...you need a good script and a good director, two things that are totally lacking here. Child actor Clement Van Den Bergh appears to be on valium throughout the film and displays a kind of passionless zero interest in the events and things going on around him. The film is incomprehensible and just a total mixed up mess, as if someone cut all the scenes out separately, jumbled them up and stuck them back together again in any old order. I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I stuck with it to the end just so I could see if it might get any better...it didn't. It's hard to see how talented (or talentless) the actors and actresses are, because the script they are given to work with is banal in the extreme. Which are the fantasy and dream sequences and which are the reality ones? Your guess is as good as mine. I've never heard of the director, Claude Miller, but whoever he is, he's no Carol Reed or Julian Duvivier. I see the film won a prize at Cannes Film Festival. Well, if the judges considered this load of rubbish to be worthy of a prize, just think how awful the rest of the films must have been that year. The only plus factor in this mess is that it is beautifully photographed, but that doesn't maintain interest for long.
jm10701
I agree with most other reviewers in liking this movie, but I disagree with almost everything they say about it. First of all, it is not hard to follow, nor is it at all hard to tell what is real and what is not. The plot is actually fairly simple, and warning that it is so complex that you have to watch it twice and answer half a dozen or more convoluted questions before you get it is absurd.It's also absurd to imply that you have to understand Freudian psychobabble to understand this movie. I don't know why people think they have to make a movie sound so hard to watch when it is not hard to watch at all.I also disagree that this is a sad, solemn movie, and that there's no humor in it. The humor is dark humor (very dark), but there's a good bit of it, as when Nicolas imagines making out with the teacher and when the hooded terrorists swarm over the school mowing everybody down with machine guns while Nicolas calmly eats food the other kids have left behind in panic. Even the scars the camera zooms in on so often and Nic's father's antics and horror stories about organ pirates are funny. It's macabre, but it's very funny.And the twist at the end? What twist? The end was obvious almost from the beginning of the movie. This is a movie, not a psychology test or an inscrutable riddle or even much of a thriller. It's a very smart, very dark comedy about children and crazy parents. In trying to over-analyze it, people miss its fun. Lighten up and enjoy it.
Boba_Fett1138
This is a quite fascinating French movie, that I wouldn't call great but is a throughout good watch nevertheless.Thing that really uplifts this movie is its directing. It makes this a great and beautiful looking one. It has a great directing style, that provides the movie with a great overall atmosphere. The movie at times picks a surreal approach and the story is being told and developed slowly.And while the movie is intriguing to watch throughout, I still wished it had a somewhat better story to work with, or that it got told just a little bit better all. Because the movie picks a more stylish approach, this really starts to go at the expense of the story. Not everything gets developed properly and some things just don't get resolved at all. In the end this is a movie that will leave you with more questions than answers. This doesn't really ruin the movie or anything and it's still a good and intriguing watch but I feel that with some more story and some better development this could had been a so much better and more memorable, unique little film. To me, the movie now is just too empty, to leave a big impression, let alone a very lasting one.It's also quite hard to say what audience this movie is really for. It's one that tells the story from the perspective of a young boy but I really wouldn't call this a children's movie. It's also not really a coming of age flick and its more being a drama-thriller, told from the mind and viewpoint of a child, which still leaves the question to what audience this movie is aimed to. A simple answer would just be movie-lovers, fore this is also really a movie that isn't just for everybody's taste. Some people might find the lack of pace and occurrences too much of a miss, while others will surely be able to appreciate the style and approach this movie is taking. The movie doesn't feature the best acting I have ever seen in a French movie and I actually thought at first that this was one of those movies that used non-professional actors, to make the movie and story work out more as a realistic one. But as it turns out all of the persons involved are actually actors, with more working experience in the business. A bit disappointing but those who don't speak or understand the language will hardly have any problems with it.Nevertheless I still really foremost liked this movie, due to its fine directing approach, which kept this movie a good and intriguing watch throughout.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/
Rodrigo Amaro
Our subconscious world's still a scientific mystery and sometimes we think we have some answers to our dreams, and our nightmares but we don't. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts may give some unsatisfactory answers to what we dream in our sleep but that's not enough. We really want to know why strange and bizarre thoughts appears out of the blue. Many claim that the real life problems is solved better (or not) in our dreams, or even say that our lives frustrations appears frequently in our dreams and with that you might get some answer to solve or battle against yourself dealing or not dealing with the problem. And then we have the nightmares, something that leave you with fear, sometimes real fear, sometimes is just silly things created in our brain. But there are nightmares that disturbs at the point that we don't even want to sleep again fearing that something bad is gonna happen. "La Classe DE Neige" (or "Class Trip") is all about dreams, nightmares, dreams capes and dangerous thoughts that may become reality.Nicolas (Clément van den Bergh) is a 12 year-old and extremely shy boy that is sent to a Class Trip in the France country side. His father (François Roy) doesn't allow him to go to the trip in the same bus where the other boys go fearing an accident because something similar happened a few days earlier. Nicolas is almost silent, and the other kids don't tend to like him very much (you might remember of Louis Malle's "Au Revoir Mon infants") because it's his first time in that camp and he's not too much sociable. To make things worst he forgot to take his suitcase with his clothes and his pajamas out of the car's trunk. He desperately need his pajamas because he wets his bed during the sleep. But a good soul borrows a pajama to him, a boy named Hodkann (Lokman Nalcakan) and they become friends. Now we get to the serious part of this drama with horror undertones. Nicolas have several nightmares and not only sleeping, sometimes he has some flashes of terrible happenings just looking to some person or watching the news on TV. His nightmares are very awkward, almost all of them related to his father, whether him suffering an car accident or Nicholas being keep apart from his dad while playing at the park. To help him during these hard times Nicolas got the support of the teachers (played by Yves Verhoeven and Emmanuelle Bercot) and Hodkann, who seems interested in all the things that happen with Nicolas. One day after locked himself out of the camp house (he lied to his teachers saying that he's sleep-walker) Nicolas tells Hodkann what's happening saying that his father is a detective investigating the kidnap of children that has their organs removed. After the disappearance of a kid of the area things starting to look different for the two friends and nothing is what it appears to be. Writer and Director Claude Miller made a great film here but something could be more developed, more mystery could be added and the ending doesn't explain the nightmares, and not even if some of the Nicolas thoughts were real or not. For instance, when the teacher is making a relaxing exercise Nicolas is the only tense kid in the room. He's thinking that his father are throwing him in a pool over and over again. That scene is never explained if he's cruel father did that to him or if it's just another dream. Another thing that bothered me was the flashback during a moment with Nicolas, his brother and his father in a park. First, we see the moment and then cut to Nicolas in the camp. Then that scene backs again but it moves forward. Totally unnecessary, the flashback is no needed and that scene could be showed in just one single take. And we have the strange dreams that Nicolas have while awake. This was very good, it give suspense and weirdness to the movie but their appearances doesn't explain a single thing and leaves the audience with questions that might sound useless to the story. Why he kissed the female teacher in that way after knowing that his father died in the dream? Is Nicolas a gay boy? (there's a few undertones here: in his dreams Hodkann appears behind him in the roller-coaster, smiling while Nicolas father is kidnapped; and in his first nightmare, look the way the hands touches when Nicolas saves Hodkann from the terrorists). Anyway, I got the feeling that this movie pointed in so many directions and in the end the mystery was not much interesting, doesn't have a big plot twist. But it's a great movie. The boy that plays Nicolas has a incredible performance. He made of Nicolas a unique character, very original not only in its terrifying nightmares but in the quiet moments too (his conversation with the teacher about the Little Mermaid is one the best scenes of the movie). It's an very original work, I was surprised at some moments thinking that it would be another movie similar to "La Spinaza del Diablo" but it was very different, a little inferior to Del Toro's work. It wasn't focused in the relationship between all the kids and/or they being cruel to Nicolas because he's a little different of the other kids, something that doesn't happen in Americans film. It didn't need to show cruel acts towards a kid, it followed in other way, showing that friendship is possible between different people and different behavior.Enjoy the mystery, the story and the great credit opening that resembles "Frantic" directed by Roman Polanski. 9/10