Giants, The

Synopsis: Two brothers, Seth and Zak (Martin Nissen and Zacharie Chasseriaud), aged 15 and 13 and 3/4, are spending their summer holidays in the country, at the house that belonged to their late grandfather. Their mother has effectively left them to their own devices and when they befriend local boy, Dany (Paul Bartel), their spirit of adventure leads them further and further in trouble.

This Belgian film won the Art Cinema prize at Cannes in 2011 and comes with a raft of lavish critical bouquets. There is no doubt that Les Géants is a splendid-looking film, both for the quality of the cinematography and for the seductively verdant countryside in which much of the story is set,  but beyond that I found it slight and uninvolving.
 
The essential subject matter of three young lads, effectively orphans, and their encounters with the harsh world of adultsclearly owes much to Huckleberry Finn, not least of all because of the prominence of the broad river that flows through their region. Lanners make the most of the picturesque potential of his Twain-like narrative, yet dramatically the film is all rather too glib to hold much interest. One may well question what the two brothers are doing on the farm of their deceased grandfather – how did they get there? why would their mother leave them without food or money but ring them regularly?  

More seriously there is little in the way of palpable dynamic between the two brothers and their new found friend as the three get themselves deeper and deeper into trouble but remain blithely unperturbed by the increasing seriousness of their situation.  And then Lanners doesn’t even bother to resolve his story but leaves his characters floating away down the river. This may have been acceptable in the context of post-Civil War America and a 1960s Disney-like representation of it but it seems highly improbable behaviour for teenagers in the early 21st century. That Lanners has chosen to ignore this incongruity will be less of a problem to those who are able to simply give themselves up to his film's rather anodyne depiction of the consequences of parental neglect. Needless to say, I was not one of them.

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