This is absolutely vintage Francois Ozon fare. He really does take French farce to a whole new level of humiliation and pain for its victims. I can't help feeling though, that the audience is being asked to laugh at rather than sympathise with their dilemmas. (Just see the scene where the young boy dresses for his hot date in some kind of lederhosen. Don't tell me you weren't giggling). Underneath the kitsch seventies style and the black humour, however, this film has a serious topic: the very nature of desire. These are characters who will do anything in order to fulfill their desires, regardless of the destruction they cause to themselves, or in the case of Leopold, others. But what else is their for them in the suburbs of a non descript German town? capitalism may let you have sex without whoever you want, but it doesn't seem to give you the tools to know whether you really want to be having sex with that person in the first place. An intelligent, witty and thought provoking film.
