#5, Jean-Daniel Cadinot's Les Minets Sauvages: In some ways, this film can be seen as a curious companion piece to my #4 choice. Both are set at all boys schools at some inexactly defined, earlier point in time, although Cadinot's boys feel more mid-20th than turn of the century. On the level of filmic quality, this member of the pair is greatly superior, displaying Cadinot's storied obsessive, voyeuristic camerawork, his fetish for pounding anal sex of every variety, and his gift for low, inventive lighting -- the central gang rape scene lit only by a single flashlight is a real stunner -- as satisfyingly as any film he's ever made. At the time it was made in the early 80s, LMS was unique among his work as it all but eschewed the overtly semiotics influenced, experimental narratives and structural play of his earlier films for a more conventional if still heavily nuanced follow-the-leader style linearity. Most of the young performers are quite attractive, and all of them seamlessly convey the vibe of repressed gay lust and hair trigger readiness to fuck or get fucked by anything that moves that Cadinot expects. Didier Hamel, playing a painfully shy loner whose wimpiness, beauty, and asocial behavior eventually draw the aforementioned gang rape is arguably the standout, but the film is so jam packed with frantic solos, powerhouse couplings, rough, no nonsense orgies, and stressed out, no-sex interludes devoted to the students' and teachers' conspiring, cruising, and stalking, that, to give LMS a compliment which porn rarely ever warrants, there's literally not a wasted frame.
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