Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

i must have seen a different film!!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Director Bavo Defurne has had a pretty successful career in writing, directing, and producing short films with the kind of active cinematography and intimacy his first feature film North Sea Texas has. Defurne's deep, often unblinking look at his subjects provide us with a truly stark look at their life, and by the end, even if the short was just ten or fifteen minutes long, we achieved an understanding with his characters and his motives became clear. Of course I'm talking about "Campfire," the short he's most regarded for. And let me say, North Sea Texas is no "Campfire." The story concerns a fourteen-year-old named Pim (Jelle Florizoone), who lives in the West Flemish area of France, circa 1970. His father is no longer alive, so his mother Yvette (Eva Van der Gucht) always seems to be in some sort of relationship. A neglected and unnoticed Pim begins to develop feelings for his seventeen-year-old neighbor, Gino (Mathias Vergels), which quickly turn sexual in the wake of Gino moving away with his girlfriend. It just so happens that Pim leaves his mother to live with other relatives and be closer with Gino and his ultimate goal is to try and make their star-crossed relationship work in the long run.Coming-out cinema is beginning to grind not only its own gears together, making for many awkward, too little too late films, but my own personal ones too. Just having gay characters and a gay love story doesn't make a film edgy, exciting, or visceral on its own merits. There needs to be more human interest in the story and, unfortunately, this is greatly lacking here. For starters, there are too many characters. There's no real reason why the mother needed to have a boyfriend in the first place and there's no true reason why Pim had to go live with his relatives anyway. The film could've easily shown him as a neglected boy just because his mother and him were growing distant with each other.Second, the film inhabits the increasingly tedious style of "less-is-more," minimalist filmmaking, which, for this type of story, simply does not work here. It's distracting and makes the film appear inherently vapid of content and story. There are too many scenes of extended periods of silence and too little scenes enriching us with these characters. Long silences can work in film if we're given something to contemplate during the time of the silence. All we're given is a very fragile, loose gay relationship between two young boys, and because of the lack of development we haven't become invested enough to truly care or even worried that something may not work out.But it appears I'm being too hard on a film, whose good intentions are noticeable and somewhat credible. Jelle Florizoone is a fine, subtle screen presence, excelling at a role that is certainly brave for his age, and likewise for Mathias Vergels, whose older character has even a little more to thing about than his lover. Quite possibly the most electric scenes in North Sea Texas are when Pim and Gino are confronting their repressed sexual tendencies in a tent in the woods, which involve many intimate sequences and alive emotion. These scenes alone make the film hard to dislike in many ways.Yet the problems in North Sea Texas are a bit too big to ignore. There's careful directing, beautiful cinematography (if we're comparing it to other works of queer cinema, it's about half as good as the kind we see in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain), and bold performances, but there's also methodical writing, too many characters, slow progression, and an achingly minimalist style present. All I can hope is that one day, the youth of France get a gay movie that could very well represent their culture in a more intricate, sophisticated way.Starring: Jelle Florizoone, Mathias Vergels, Eva van der Gucht, Katelijne Damen, and Noor Ben Taouet. Directed by: Bavo Defurne.

The 'coming-of-age' genre is really too broad to describe North Sea Texas, the first feature film from Belgian Director Bavo Defurne. There have been many films which portray the highs and lows of adolescent gay love, but few which do so in a way which draws you into their world in such an imaginative and creative way. The awkward silences, deserted roads and the long empty beach are symbolic of the emotional isolation of "dreamer" Pim. His only refuge being the place where he feels acceptance and understanding is with his 'surrogate' family - single mother Marcella, her daughter Sabrina, and son Gino - the subject of his love.Jelle Floorizoone, (Pim) carries the film with incredible maturity and professionalism, helped by an excellent cast of characters who add to the film's charm and depth. Empathy with Pim comes naturally, and many will have been down a similar road - though clever twists keep you guessing and, just when you think you know what's coming around the corner, it takes an unexpected turn. As the boys grow older Gino drifts away from Pim, into the arms of a French girl, culminating in a confrontation of rage on an empty wind-swept beach. "Sometimes people have to make choices" is Gino's excuse, but when his mother is taken seriously ill, he returns to find Pim at her side. Sometimes it takes the love of an understanding mother, through a simple gesture, to show that her son's choice may not be the right one.Having first seen North Sea Texas in the cinema earlier this year, and now again on DVD, it's a film that warrants repeated viewings. Like a painting, North Sea Texas has many layers: the more you look the more you see, understand & appreciate. Emotional and uplifting, North Sea Texas is one of the most engaging & original films about adolescent gay love since Danish Director Lasse Nielsen's ground-breaking "You Are Not Alone".Included on the DVD is a short but excellent Premiere Featurette and film trailer. Running time 01:34:19, format 2.35:1, audio Dolby Digital 5.1

If you are down, try this movie. It's excellent creation of time and space. The actors are all believable.and this movie should have gone to the Oscars instead ! It would be nominated for best soundtrack, best picture, best actors, best photography. Suited from 12 years old. No violence. Compare it with 'Get Real', and 'A beautiful Thing' but better.It give an excellent idea how gay's explore their world in the 1950-1960's in Belgium.

This is the story of Pim, a quiet, reserved gay Belgian boy, from the age of about ten (my guess, although he may be as young as seven or eight) to 17. In some ways, it is yet another coming-out or coming-of-age story, but it is extraordinary in so many ways that I hesitate to put it in that or any other category. It is very beautiful (both esthetically and emotionally), extraordinarily well written, produced, photographed, directed and - especially - acted. It is so far above the typical gay movie in every measure of quality that it really belongs in a class all its own.Telling what the movie is about does it a disservice, because - although even the story is not typical - HOW it tells the story is even more important than the story itself. It is a very well made and well acted movie that really must be seen to be appreciated, but since this seems to be the first review, I'll give it a shot.Pim lives with his bawdy, busty, blonde, unmarried mother Yvette near the North Sea and the French border. She is a semi-professional singer and accordion-player who is not unkind but prefers partying to mothering. As a result of her haphazard parenting, Pim spends considerable time on his own, often sitting quietly at a table by himself in a seaside roadhouse named Texas (which gives the movie its title) while Yvette plays and parties with her friends. Yvette has a companion named Étienne who does not live with her but drives her to gigs in other towns, who tries to be friendly to Pim but whom Pim clearly dislikes.The elements of coming out in this move are not related to Pim, who seems to take being gay for granted, even as a child, and never shows any discomfort or uncertainty about it at all. Both his mother and Marcella, the (also single) mother of his two friends Gino and Sabrina, accept him as he is, although Marcella cares for him more than his mother does.Since Yvette is often away, Pim spends a lot of time at his friends' house - so much that Marcella treats him as if he is her own son, and Pim's most important relationship is with Gino.Gino is three years older than Pim, and as Pim approaches his 15th and Gino his 18th birthday, they become lovers. Their love scenes together are extraordinary in not being salacious or stereotyped or stale or shocking in even the slightest degree. They are tender yet passionate and very, very beautiful; and I never once thought, "I've seen this before." In fact, I never thought that at any point in the movie; it was as if I were watching a movie about gay teenage love for the first time.Gino is the one who has trouble coming out, and eventually he moves to Dunkirk to live with a French girl. (Except when the actor playing Pim changes, the passage of time is not clear in this movie; and when Pim and Gino next meet, the only way we know it's two years later is that Gino mentions that Pim will be 17 soon.) Pim is devastated that Gino has abandoned him with no warning. The entry of a young Gypsy named Zoltan distracts Pim from his grief momentarily, until it becomes obvious Zoltan prefers Yvette.I'm making this wonderful movie sound trite and dull, so I'm going to quit trying to tell what it's about. In essence, it's about a gay boy who has a LOT more sense and inner strength and is a LOT more stable and self-aware than anybody around him, and how his strength and patience dramatically affect the course of his life.As I said in the beginning, this movie is so good in so many ways that I could write pages about how good it is. But I will limit my praise to the actor who plays the older (14-17-year-old) Pim and the director who encouraged him to give such a strong, courageous, subtle but stunning performance.I believe the actor (whose name is Jelle Florizoone) was around 15 when the movie was made, and although he had worked on TV a little, this seems to be his first movie. But that kid carried this whole movie (because Pim really IS the whole movie) as masterfully and as effortlessly as Brando carried On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire. He is amazing.Fortunately for those of us who don't know Dutch, there isn't much dialog, so reading subtitles rarely distracts from watching the movie. But Florizoone is so good with his face and with his body that he really doesn't need words to tell us what's going on, any more than Brando did. It would be a beautiful performance from any actor at any age, but the fact that he's 15 years old (when even great child actors start to falter) makes it even more impressive.I've learned not to predict future stardom for young actors who give extraordinarily powerful performances in gay movies, because it never happens. But if any teenager working in movies today deserves to become a big star, Jelle Florizoone does. And if any director deserves a chance to make any movie he wants to make any way he wants to make it, Bavo Defurne does.