Camille Perton's "Les Arènes": a treasure deal

Les Arènes is a football film, not a sports film. It's intriguing for this reason, despite the clumsiness—the film really gets going around the fortieth minute, when it grasps its stakes. We only see footwork in a short juggling act by Brahim, the budding champion hero, and a little later, an impromptu match with the neighborhood kids. It's also intriguing that Camille Perton is a woman, a football-loving filmmaker infiltrated into this male milieu whose homosexual desire she decides to chronicle. She borrows from the precise genre of innocent gangsters (a bit like Téchiné ), and transforms a locker room scene into a scene of desire, a sequence of negotiations in exchange for love. The pleasant surprise thus comes from this audacity, from the clearly queer sensuality that emerges: Les Arènes is a film about guys negotiating, not about athletes with leg-overs. A woman at the heart of this mercato-libido fiction is as enjoyable, if you will, as the dance of Cyd Charisse and the boxers in Beau fixe over New York , or Jane Russell's number among the gymnasts in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The Arè