Our first time. Films about schoolchildren are different; funny and sad, moralizing and mischievous, cruel and easy, but not always sincere and open. Speaking of the young generation, it is easy to slide into a pathetic sermon about the ideally correct growing up, or, on the contrary, unnecessarily denigrate the youth, presenting it as a brainless and lustful herd. It is difficult to find a middle ground, showing the exciting moments of life without five minutes of adults, bypassing the depressive tantrums about irretrievably spoiled children. After all, the maturity of any teenager occurs through personal discoveries and mistakes, thanks to which a small person acquires the experience necessary to build a life path, and there is nothing terrible about cigarettes, alcohol and sex experiments, unless it leads to severe addiction and chronic immorality. And if, ideally, tobacco and booze can be and should be avoided without touching them at all (although in our time it is extremely difficult to imagine this), then sex is an absolutely normal part of the life of any person, without contrived viciousness, and be ashamed to talk about it as a natural need, as if it does not exist, how strange and hypocritical. Another thing is that in such a topic one should observe tact, but call things by their proper names, without hypertrophied shyness.
“I Love You More” is a simple, direct and honest story about the first sex of high school students, shown as a slice of life, with no beginning and no end, just as an important moment in the short lives of a guy and a girl, after which they will become different, not better or worse, but simply people who have entered an important phase of adulthood. And even if their first time in the film seems random, spontaneous, clumsy, but often it happens in life. It is simply a natural call of the flesh, for which a natural moment of awakening has come, and to interpret it as something vulgar and inappropriate is at least wrong. The director, shooting the film in 2008, not in vain transfers the action to 20 years ago, showing that a certain “sexual carelessness and promiscuity” of young people, which many boring heralds of reinforced concrete and sublime morality like to talk about, is not the scourge of our “spiritless” time, but quite existed and lived in bygone years. Such films are just needed in order to learn to perceive the first teenage sex as a natural episode of growing up, and not as a terrible fall, interpreted this way by some “highly spiritual” people. Pay attention to how natural and by no means went the story of the mutual loss of virginity, and not as a long-awaited embodiment of “indecent” desires and fantasies, but as the start of a close relationship that may well develop into true love. Therefore, if we speak in the language of cinema on the theme of “the first time”, the picture by Sam Taylor-Johnson is a worthy example of a frank, but at the same time delicate sketch about the beginning of sexual life at a tender age.
9 out of 10