Le Clan review

This occasionally brutal yet strangely beguiling slice-of-lifer from writer/ director Gaël Morel tells the fragmented story of three disaffected French brothers who spend hot sunny days dealing drugs, getting stoned, drinking, fighting, shaving their own pubes, watching porn and having anal sex with pre-op transsexuals.

Everything changes, though, when eldest brother and ex-con Christophe (Stéphane Rideau) decides to go straight, leaving recalcitrant middle-brother Marc (Nicolas Cazalé) at the mercy of local drug thugs and forcing youngest brother Olivier (Thomas Dumerchez) to face the legacy of their mother's premature death.

The pumped-up skinhead machismo here has echoes of Romper Stomper, the criminal post-pubescent multi-ethnic milieu nods to La Haine, while the explicit homoerotica is straight out of Claire Denis' Beau Travail. But Le Clan itself, in all its poetic male detachment, is totally unique.