god_de_zoon
"Steve is your average slum french kid with no real future. one day he sees a gorgeous girl at the bowling alley who needs a light. unfortunately shortly after, he's thrown into jail for a load of e, he means an ex-bouncer Jean-claude. Jean-claude is in a wheelchair but hes a cool man and is getting out of jail soon. once he's out he wants to open a club. as luck has it, one of the dancers for his club is Sky, the girl he saw before he went to jail. Steve + Sky is tells about a wild passionate love between the two ruffians" i can agree to that, but i'd just like to add it's not a french movie, but a Belgian one. the movie is not in french but in a dutch accent, "gents", something only native dutch speakers can appreciate i guess. subsequently the soundscapes used in the movie aren't "french" as well, but made by a Belgian (Flemish) duo called "the f*cking dewaele brothers". all in all, i do believe this is an excellent movie by a very talented director. of course we have to take in account it was made with a really small budget (apr. 700.000 USD), so it cant be compared with American blockbuster-movies. if you need one big reason to see the movie: Delfine Bafort, the model-becomes-actress who plays Sky. she IS yummie material.
spaceship_1
Titus De Voogdt and Johan Heldenbergh are wonderful actors who are underplaying very effectively the whole film and create this sense of cool reality. Delfine Bafort is a model who is very convincing in her first big role. There is a scene where she tries to connect with Steve where we actually believe she doesn't really care about Steve, but plays it as we believe she actually want to tell him she loves him. Great love story! Just a shame the film has just such a terrible quality and we feel that the whole film has no real viewpoint. It lacks a little bit of edge, where American movies are so great in. But this is maybe due to the lack of experience. Same actors other director, please !!
sidderke
I already saw this movie 2 times and I'm planning to see it another time.Although the story in itself is very simple (a love story), the screenplay is great and very unpredictable.Great acting by Johan Heldenberg (or something like that) who plays Jean-Claude, a beautiful real Steve portraited by Titus Devoogt and a mystical Sky, played by Delfine -i don't know her last name.Direction is beautiful, with great editing (flashbacks-flashforwards), stunning cinematography (it's shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm). There is no thing about it that I don't like, from the music to the beautiful images to it's great ending (not an usual ending as mostly with love stories). Complements to Felix van Groeningen who delivers here a fantastic debutThe movie is full of great scenes, with some very funny dialogues and some very touching moments ('Dromen zijn Bedrog'-scene is wonderful).It's like you are in trance for 100 minutes... Great movie
Philipppe Francois
The film starts off by a story told by Jean-Claude (played by a great Johan Heldenbergh), an amusing invalid with great dreams but with a little mind. The story is about a dispute between a father and a son. An Opel Cadet is the subject of this bizarre story. Throughout the movie this story keeps on coming back. Every character tells it in her/his own way - which is a beautiful character sketch. The explosion of the car opens up to the intro of the, in her own weird way, confident woman called sky (played by Delphine Bafort - who is actually a model).The movie tells the tale of two people, Steve + Sky, living their marginal life. Steve (Titus Devoogt) is a crook who decides to turn his life around after his time in jail - this doesn't mean he's giving up stealing. He now wants his life to evolve around one person, himself. When Sky falls in love with him, after she had some bad luck with her last boyfriend, he acts as if he doesn't care and he will keep on acting that way, but in the end everyone knows he's in love with her too.The thing that touched me the most was the ironical destruction. Every character in the movie likes to walk right into some kind of accident: Sky always falls in love with the wrong guys but still she keeps on bashing her head into these relationships; Steve is a crook and will always be a crook even in the worst moments he steals things; Claude has great dreams (Steve also falls for these dreams) and good intentions but he will always end up alone and even Claude's daughter has fatalistic impressions.
The strength of the movie is not the acting (which is quite good), but the directing job is simply astonishing. So much beauty in one movie, so many great situations and point of views and all that created by a simple Belgian director. The greatest moment in the movie for me was without doubt the ending where Steve crashes his motorcycle and ends up somewhere in a bush. Heavily bleeding he's lying there. Behind him there's a building with in big letters on it `GIVE BLOOD'. Magical comedy! This goes for the whole movie. A beauty!