Le Ciel, les Oiseaux et… Ta Mère!

Four friends from the Paris suburbs (Debbouze, Soo Mongo, Deutsch and Courbey) win a three week holiday to Biarritz. They attack the resort with the simple agenda of 'beach, babes, ass', but they are swiftly thrown on the defensive by the forces of penury, sexual inexperience and inexpedience, and by the fact that they're quite obviously full of shit. Co-written and directed by first-timer Bensalah, this has the flavour of personal reminiscence. The film is punctuated with camcorder footage, as if the boys' own, but the director's five or six years' vantage on his protagonists hasn't given him much on them in terms of human knowledge or film-making know how. Discussions occasionally touch on pertinent issues of race, education, elitism, social exclusion and access to the natural environment, contrasting the boys' confined world view with the life style of Biarritz, but mostly the film sticks with the boys' sexual slang. Debbouze is the most watchable, but he's also a despicable little ball of hate, wantonly indulged by the director. Even teenage boys deserve a better case than this.