As Arnaud Desplechin's regular writing partner, Emmanuel Bourdieu has been responsible for creating some of the most sprawling, mysterious and maddening French films in recent memory, including Esther Kahn (2000) and My Sex Life, or How I Got into an Argument (1996). By contrast, Bourdieu's belated directorial debut, Poison Friends, is very nearly as blunt as its title. Set at the Sorbonne, the film concerns a handful of tentative, uncertain grad students who fall under the virulent spell of self-styled literary bad boy André Morney (Thibault Vinçon), a spiteful tool who uses fear of mediocrity as a bullwhip. Virtually everything that comes out of André's mouth constitutes toxic, pretentious nonsense — he's fond of citing Karl Kraus on the subject of people who write only because they're too weak not to write — but his sheer conviction proves alluring to young people in desperate need of direction and guidance, and he slowly accrues disciples whose nascent lives and careers he can scuttle.
Bourdieu clearly knows these preening collegiate chuckleheads inside and out, and he's assembled a remarkable cast of unknowns to embody them; each character makes a vivid and distinct impression, even though most of them are in geosynchronous orbit around André. Trouble is, Bourdieu doesn't know from subtext and seems allergic to adjectives like "glancing" and "allusive." Everything gets laid out neatly at the get-go, and nothing ever develops; the film is so straightforward that it winds up feeling both overdetermined and a little thin — it's almost as if Bourdieu went ahead and make the Hollywood remake of his movie, only in French.
Still, the milieu is fascinating, the performances are casually terrific across the board, and Bourdieu's knack for hyperliterate gamesmanship partially fills the void left by Whit Stillman, whose Metropolitan is an unmistakable influence — though the tone here is less affectionate, more corrosive. Maybe I just can't resist a movie in which the temerity to write and publish fiction or poetry is tantamount to indecent exposure. There's a germ of hard truth here: success can get you ostracized almost as readily as failure. — Mike D'Angelo