Just what I expected

The first must-see film of the year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

If you're here because you enjoy the cinema, you will certainly like the story but also the way it's told. The characters, historical context and acting are both intriguing and convincing. Actually, I decided to write these few lines after I read the few reviews not doing justice to this film. Hence my first line: cinema is cinema and novel is novel. I can understand the frustration of novel readers but also I can't help asking what their opinion would have been if they had not read the novel. Not having read the book, I had the chance to appreciate the film in its own values. Whether it's a good or poor adaptation should be a separate discussion.

Swedish screenwriter and television and film director Mikael Marcimain's second feature film which he wrote with Swedish screenwriter, translator and author Klas Östergren, is an adaptation of a novel from 1980 by Klas Östergren. It premiered in Sweden, was shot on locations in Sweden, France, Lithuania and Jutland and is a Swedish production which was produced by producers Johannes Åhlund, Mattias Nohrborg and Fredrik Heinig. It tells the story about a Swedish citizen named Klas Östergren whom whilst working at a golf club in Sweden is approached by a book publisher named Franzén who asks him to write a pastiche about a renowned literary work by a renowned Swedish author. Distinctly and precisely directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Marcimain, this finely paced fictional tale which is narrated by the main characters and mostly from their viewpoints, draws a densely intriguing portrayal of a writer whom after meeting and befriending a Swedish boxer and pianist in his thirties named Henry Morgan whom is preparing for an upcoming concert at a theatre, moves in with him in his apartment in Hornsgatan, Stockholm in Sweden and begins working on his assignment. While notable for its versatile and atmospheric milieu depictions, reverent cinematography by cinematographer Jalle Kebarainen Faber, production design by production designer Linda Janson and costume design by costume designer Cilla Rörby, this character-driven and narrative-driven story, depicts some externally abridged studies of character and contains a great and timely score by composer Mattias Bärjed.This somewhat historic, modestly romantic and literary thriller which is set in Sweden, Germany, France and Jutland mostly in the late 1960s and 1970s, partly inspired by real events and where a Swedish brother welcomes a new acquaintance into his home and starts a relation with a woman named Maud who is involved with a secretive business man, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, subtle character development, rhythmic continuity, cinematic style of filmmaking and the engagingly understated acting performances by Swedish actors David Fukamachi Regnfors, David Dencik, Sverrir Gudnason, Swedish-Spanish actress Ruth Vega Fernandez and Swedish actress Jennie Silvferhjelm. A darkly humorous and stylistically cinematographic narrative feature.

Mikael Marcimain created a minor masterpiece of Gellert Tamas story book "Lasermannen" (2005). Since then Marcimain has provided us with the dull and faded "Call Girl" and now the lavish "Gentlemen". Klas Östergren's novel is a fresco of stray individuals in Stockholm during the end seventies. Rich in characters, details, interiors and soul. However I think it was a mistake by Östergren to take on the screenplay as well. Director Marcimain is partly lost in this world of "Gentlemen". He is unable to cover the story. A lot of the scenes seems unrehearsed. But, David Dencik is miraculously good. Ruth Vega Fernandez and Boman Oscarsson fits nicely in the drama. The editing is wrenched. A small consolation is that Östergrens inspiration from Strindberg's "The ghost sonata" and Ibsen's "The wild duck" is intact in the apartment and house of the Morgan Brothers.

This is a famous book from the late 70s by Klas Östergren. It can still be read as living literature and is perhaps the big monument over life in Stockholm during that decade. Mysteries, people with a past, people with no future.Östergren has written the script for this film, but that stands back for the visual. They have really tried to recreate the 70s, but we who were part of it, as almost always, find good details but not the mood and the spirit of the period.The sad thing is that the novel anyway is almost more visual than the film which is reduced to a story among others. Which is a pity.