Early on in Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), the film’s teen heroine is being cajoled into breaking curfew by her naughtier peers. “No, I’m grounded: it’s a trust thing,” she pleads, half-heartedly, before her pals thrust a joint in her hand. “Have some of this instead.”
Suddenly, writer-director Eva Husson’s hazy, naturalistic drama has swerved into Reefer Madness territory. Expect much more of the same.
Based on Husson’s own recollections of the long, hot summer of 1996, Bang Gang still looks exactly like Larry Clark’s Kids rebooted for the Snapchat generation.
The film concerns two 16-year-old friends in provincial France: the shy, sexually inexperienced Laetitia (Daisy Broom) and her more daring, skateboarding chum George (Marilyn Lima, a mini-me Bardot). Enter Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), a boy whose mother has gone to work in Morocco, leaving him home alone with an apparently endless supply of booze and weed.
He seduces George by telling her he thinks Laetitia ugly, then later reverses the trick by telling Laetitia he thinks George is ugly. “I wanted my first time to be special,” says Laetitia, after he has filmed her losing her virginity.
And what could be more special than uploading the video to YouTube, right?
Determined to win Alex back, a wounded George instigates a series of summer orgies, whereby their schoolyard friends are all invited to what she calls a “Bang Gang”.
Impromptu invitations arrive by text message. Participants come, have sex, do drugs, film each other, look kind of bored and wait for the inevitable moment when they all get their comeuppance with a capital STI.
We’ve seen this film before. Freewheeling shots of naked cavorting teens make one almost expect the words “Terry Richardson for American Apparel” to appear on the screen. That might be enough to recommend the picture for dirty raincoats or people who like to tut at the youth of today, were it not for all the structural problems.
Bang Gang can’t decide on a protagonist or focus; it toys with voiceover, then drops it; it appears to break the fourth wall, then forgets to do it again.
Husson directs her youthful cast well and displays a fine knack for everyday detail, but this, alas, is a hot mess.
