The Lost Boys (LES PARADIS) – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Zeno Graton
Writers – Zeno Graton, Clara Bourreau, Maarten Loix
Stars – Khalil Ben Gharbia, Julien De Saint Jean, Eye Haidara

In his 1958 autobiographical work, Borstal Boy, Brendan Behan (1923-64) describes his three-year stint in a British borstal. Despite the grimness and bleakness, he discovers a more sensitive side and an empathy for fellow inmates.  The sexual longing of this period of incarceration is more interrogated by Jim and Peter Sheridan in their insightful Meet the Quare Fella which ran at the Viking Theatre in 2016.  Here in this first-time film, an even more intense expression of that longing is given full, if not explicit, expression revealing not only deft direction but an empathy and an ability to get the best out of an accomplished cast.

A collection of young men, the Lost Boys of the English title, are in a juvenile detention centre.  Subject to strict rules, discipline, and a regime of exercise and skills training the intention is to set them on a path to freedom, a path which will preclude them from being taken into the adult prison world.  Our main focus is on the doe-eyed Joe who is coming up to being released into the adult world.   It is all too apparent that the real outside world of jobs and apartments, household bills and more, is looming like a juggernaut coming down the track, for which Joe may not be ready.   By contrast, the day-to-day deprivations of the detention centre almost appear as a comfort zone.   The food looks half decent and the warders are supportive.

Into this steady and regulated existence arrives the slightly edgier William – the actor Julien de Saint Jean, seen recently in Lie With Me, obviously an actor who can exude sexual energy and allure with just a fleeting glance (let’s hope he does not get typecast).  Through such stolen glances, with almost Princess Diana-like downcast eyes, it is clear that there is an enormous sexual attraction between the two youths and this grows in potency and charge throughout the film.  Never explicit it highlights how sexual energy can be all the more electrifying through suggestion rather than overt display. On the emotional level, we are almost part of their journey caught up as we are in that awful tension between wanting freedom (the outside world) and yet longing to be safe with someone we love, even if that means enduring material hardships.  This is handled wonderfully and evocatively.  Additionally, there is an underlying observation on questions of incarcerations and what can be achieved, or possibly not, when even the good work and theory come up against the intractable systems and biases of the outside world.  That all the inmates are more akin to Abercrombie & Fitch models than hardened street-wise kids, is a minor caveat in what is a  very poetic piece of cinema,