Smart Ass

Smart Ass, or La crème de la crème, which is the film's original title, is a daring and youthful French take on the student movie genre.

The film is very French. That means it's approach to showing the reality without taking any short cuts, neither to explicits, nor to the thoughts of disillusioned teenage students without any scruples. Calling these the "creme de la creme", which means the cream of the crop, is obviously with loads of irony. Still, the content is really not far fetched at all, but rather realistic.

We meet some trade school students with sexual urges attending a posh school, getting to think that market approach is possible on anything, and there is a "market" which decides who is successful in getting the right partners. They decides to "rent" youths to go to parties, being the school's pimps.

Strangely enough film struggles in keeping my interest, which it shouldn't with a quite exciting plot. but when it does, it's down to the narrative sides of the movie. The film tries to be sexy without being sexy, funny without being funny and when the film builds up to something interesting, it suddenly breaks the moment. Still it's partly explicit when it comes to the sexual bits. I find many french drama films have this, and might learn from some of the recent French action movies, which manges the narrative very well. So it comes down to being just OK.

Still the film is worth a watch, and would easily be remade in Hollywood.