MOVIE: THE FRENCH KISSERS

Remember the awkward just-hit-puberty years when you were totally consumed by the opposite sex – particularly when you were going to talk to/pash/shag them? The director of The French Kissers does. And he puts us right back into the classroom so we can smell the BO, witness the whitehead cycles and taste the swapped saliva. Squeamish yet? Graphic artist Riad Sattouf transformed his popular cartoons into an uncompromising cultural milieu filled with average-looking outcasts like Herve and the awesomely-mulleted Camel who, without their sexual urges, are nothing. But unlike those American viginity-losing banalities, this French film loses the clichés and ups the masturbation quota making it more clumsy, real and shocking – not to mention hilarious. Completely left of centre, this is the funniest underdog film of 2009. (RK)