The Weekend's Entertainment

A brief post this evening about two films watched over the weekend: I had written more extensively on André Téchiné's fine drama Les Témoins (a fictionalised account of an early French AIDS case from 1984) but just as I was about to post, Camino crashed and removed all trace of the text, making me think of going back to Firefox, despite the trouble I had been having with it for a while. I have neither the time nor the will to reconstruct the post so I will just recommend the film in passing, an unsentimental yet discreetly affecting tale about a group of friends coping with bereavement. Great acting all round, particularly from Sami Bouajila and Michel Blanc.

There was also Tough Enough, an uneven but diverting German film by director Detlev Buck. The tale of a 15-year-old plunged into a rough school in Berlin when his mother gets kicked out of home by her rich lover. He quickly becomes the object of some brutal bullying by some of the rough lads, only to fall into favour (in a rather contrived fashion) with an Arab gangster. Despite some terrible plotting - as well the deus ex machina intervention of the local caid in question, the film's peripheral characters come and go perfunctorily, often when they are beginning to get interesting - the film is directed with a good deal of verve and is at times credible enough, being a suitable companion film to last years's violent Kurds and Turks abroad drama Fratricide. Worth a look.