The King of Escape

2009 [FRENCH]

Action / Adventure / Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 36% · 9 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 36% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.2/10 10 857 857

age-gap relationship farm cruising tractor forbidden love salesman

Plot summary

43-year-old Armand Lacourtade, a man who sells farm machines in the country, is getting sick of his homosexual life. When he encounters a young girl called Curly, he changes sides. Chased by her parents and the police, they brave all dangers to live this forbidden love and become an odd couple. But is it really what Armand dreamed about?

Director

Alain Guiraudie Photo
Alain Guiraudie

Top cast

Luc Palun Photo
Luc Palun as Daniel Durandot
Hafsia Herzi Photo
Hafsia Herzi as Curly Durandot
Nicolas Robin Photo
Nicolas Robin as Le jeune
Pascal Aubert Photo
Pascal Aubert as Paul, le patron
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
822.67 MB
1280*544
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles fr  
25 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds ...
1.65 GB
1920*816
French 5.1
NR
Subtitles fr  
25 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds 2

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by didier-20

alternative explanation to the polarised comments

I had to sleep on this film to really get it.What happens: An utterly french form of cinematic licence generates classic and true surreal humour. A playful narrative reversal based on an all prevailing rule of 'what if' . What if: 1.You take a common narrative - the straight married man's midlife crisis leads him to seek comfort in a gay friend and question his sexuality - and reverse that to a partnered non-monogamous gay man has a midlife crisis and seeks comfort in an affair with a teenage girl. 2.You take a common cinematic portrayal of the gay man as young, good looking, urban, sophisticated and inverse that to one of a fat, perhaps unattractive, unsophisticated, small town (straight butch role of) tractor dealer. This narrative inverse generates the unusual context from which we shall experience provincial french life. From that point, the logic of questioning 'possibility' itself quickly accelerates and dominates the film. What if the Conservative catholic small minded provincial France commonly portrayed as the real France allows for men to commit sodomy and fellatio each other as a matter of course ? What if sex is made predominant on all levels of provincial France - gang rape, gay cruising, underage sex, etc so that in the end the 'what if' logic runs out of control and poses the ultimate question, at what point should one stop undoing expectation and to what extent, if you reverse all expectation, do you alter reality ? The excessiveness of narrative reversal turns out to be a classic surrealist strategy.The English translation of this film is "The King of Escape' - but a better translation would be 'The king of evasion'. Armand carries with him this honour despite on many occasions appearing to look like the ultimate loser. He spends most of his time literally running around France in nothing but his underpants. The question of evasion is central to the purpose and intent of this film. The evasion of expectation at any cost. Armand's midlife crisis embodies that reflex - indeed you could argue all psychological crisis is a play off between the need for confrontation and the desire to escape. The film goads conservative France with a relentless uncomfortable matter of fact explicitness. In doing so it forces both hidden realities and fantasies to the fore. A deceptively simple film turns out to be a clever well thought out and powerful form of speculation about how we implicitly engineer society.
Reviewed by rdiansangu 1 / 10

Quite possibly one of the worst films I've ever had the misfortune to see....

Where to begin?!A good start would be the total, even fraudulent,misuse of the word 'comedy' to describe this film. Bearing in mind the storyline (middle aged homosexual man in a small french village becomes involved with a sixteen year old girl), I knew I wouldn't be rolling in the aisles with laughter but I did expect witty, ironic and wry (but not too much since they are French after all ...). What I got was a handful of badly delivered, moderately funny lines and a total absence of any, even slightly, comic scenes. Which brings me to the next problem, the so called plot. Again I didn't expect a Hollywoodian epic, just a well written plot with strong characters.The reality? A series of 'scenes' with no particular sense, a large number of which focused on a man cycling or running or looking socially inept. The characters were one dimensional characters,for which I felt no interest, empathy or affinity. I had no idea where the film was going (nowhere, incidentally)and I had the impression neither did the director. In short I found this film self-satisfied,pretentious and dull.
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