I Want You
Michael Winterbottom‘s I Want You is about a mute 14 year old in England who, with his curiously high end equipment despite the poverty he lives in, records couples making out, having sex, and other embarrassing and plot important situations. Rachel Weisz is the woman he falls in love with, she was also in love with someone when she was 14, the brother from Face/Off, Alessandro Nivola, and he’s come back to town to stalk her, after serving jail time for murder. The obvious parallels aside, they faintly explore the sexual possibilities between the 14 year old kid and Weisz, though his sexual development is a bit confusing as well. His promiscuous sister has no problem hugging him in bed with her shirt off, because he isn’t seen as more than a sad, lonely boy. Also since she sleeps around so much, we get to see a variety of men naked, I never thought they’d get a black semi-erect dick + balls into an R rated movie (the MPAA does not have a predilection for sex involving darkies), especially with all the nudity the film has besides that. The movie doles out bits of information about the character’s past quite slowly, until you realize that’s all there is to the film, because the trajectory of the characters is obvious. Only the kid, who is for some reason not thought of as a pervert (especially as he does stuff like unrealistically bug every place he goes, there’s a scene late in the film where he records something and there was never a moment where he would go back to the scene to recover the tape, and the movie makes it appear that he would never want to, and yet he has it the next day), does anything that doesn’t seem part of a plot mechanism, and not all that often. However, the ending was rather a surprise to me, even if it doesn’t make complete sense, and is extremely contrived.
