Come Undone.

Come Undone (Presque Rien) * Written by Sebastien Lifshitz and Stephane Bouquet * Directed by Lifshitz * Starring Jeremie Elkaim and Stephane Rideau * Picture This!

Sebastien Lifshitz's Come Undone is the most mature depiction of a young gay male's romantic awakening I have ever seen, least of all because it trains an unblushing gaze on two teenage guys banging each other in the folds of a seaside dune. The fervently antisentimental Lifshitz is so unfazed by the intimacy of men together and so averse to the cliche signifiers of coming out (the wary parents; the funny, asexual gal pal), he is able to bypass conventional narrative gestures altogether and speak to us in a kind of emotional shorthand.

Employing a series of nonlinear, jaggedly cut scenes that compel us to fill in the gaps, Lifshitz simulates the inner hubbub of an 18-year-old man struggling to separate himself from the perpetual disturbances of family. Come Undone stretches beyond a fateful summer that Mathieu (Jeremie Elkaim) spends at his parents' beach house.

Mathieu shrugs off his family to be with Cedric (Wild Reeds' Stephane Rideau), a hunky doughnut peddler he spies on the beach. The pair become inseparable, indulging in one of those idyllic summer romances that haunt the memory during the inexorable rush of older years. How the families deal with homos in their midst takes a backseat, along with the relationship itself, to the turbulence of a teenager at one of the most fragile stations of life trying to negotiate a sense of self. A summer's worth of moonlit passion and a relatively accepting home life are not enough to save Mathieu from the family melancholia. Making Mr. Right, Lifshitz reminds us, is no substitute for getting your own house in order.

A journey toward self-completion also propels Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Adventures of Felix, in which a 30-ish resident of a northern French seaside village responds to his job layoff by embarking on a trip to Marseilles in pursuit of a father he has never met. With the approval of his devoted lover, Daniel (Pierre-Loup Rajot), Felix (Sami Bouajila) sets off on a five-day trek in which he constructs an alternative family that all but renders his paternal obsession meaningless.

Ingratiating their protagonists with their audiences has rarely been a top priority of French directors, and that becomes problematic in this road picture from the makers of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy. Felix is a complicated soul, an HIV-positive French Arab with a high political consciousness and low taste for TV soaps, whose responses to racism inspire some less-than-sympathetic behavior.

Hitching a ride with an openhearted mother of two young kids, Felix gets them into an accident when he forces her to circumnavigate a town because it voted for the extreme right. Felix's presumptuous action is barely less nettlesome than his withholding and patronizing behavior toward a teenage student who develops a crush on him. Despite Bouajila's charmless performance, the film ebbs and flows according to its hero's encounters. The film soars with the arrival of the effervescent Patachou as Mathilde, a feisty senior citizen with a philosophical view of the primacy of family. Salty and warm with liberal excess, Patachou makes us yearn for Adventures of Mathilde instead.