Twenty-year-old Loic Pierre Chatagny , a chocolate factory worker in Bulle in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, is caught up in online sex, which takes him frequently to Lausanne. Instead of requesting sex, the man asks Loic about himself -- his thoughts, ideas, dreams and plans.
Throughout the film Lionel and Loic will meet occasionally, and Lionel in effect becomes the mirror in which Loic is able to see himself in the process of self-discovery. The film was shot on weekends and on evenings when Chatagny was off from his job. The story Baier and co-writer Laurent Guido build around Chatagny has Loic heading to Lausanne regularly for endless rounds of impersonal sexual trysts, which he relates in unsolicited detail to his longtime friend Marie Natacha Koutchoumov , who lets him stay in her apartment, even sharing her bed.
Marie is an intelligent and lovely student working as a receptionist at a natural history museum. She tells Loic nobody knows her better than he, which if true is sad, because he is as uneducated as she is intellectually sophisticated. He also is totally unaware she is hopelessly in love with him.
Having never experienced it, he never considers that he may be looking for love in countless brief sexual encounters. Marie and Lionel are drawn to Loic because of his openness and his curiosity. The gradual flowering of his mind and heart prompts an occasional amusing awkwardness that becomes the core of the film as Loic ultimately becomes aware of what he does not want to be, even if he is unsure of what he does want to be.
A Picture This! Entertainment release. Director Lionel Baier. Screenplay Baier, Laurent Guido. Cinematographers Severine Barde, Baier. Editor Christine Hoffet. Music selections by Sergei Rachmaninoff. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Exclusively at the Sunset 5, Wilshire Blvd. Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
