Come As You Are   Starring: Gilles De Schryver Robrecht Vanden Thoren and Tom Audenaert Distributor: Eureka! RRP: £14.99 EKA40371 Certificate: 15 Release Date: 07 October 2013

All teenagers have the same basic problem, they spend too much of their time horny. For your average kid this is not a problem and they will pass through the teenage ritual humiliation and rejection, just like everyone else. But for three friends life has placed extra barriers between them and the female form. Lars, Jozef and Philip are all disabled and determined to get laid. They discover that there is a particular whore house which specialises in the disabled, but it’s in Spain. Having lied to their parents, to be allowed to go with only one companion, the boys are off in search of sun sangria and sex...

Come As You Are (Hasta La Vista - 2011 - 1 hr, 49 min, 33 sec) is a coming of age comedy by Flemish director Geoffrey Enthoven, from a script by Mariano Vanhoof. The film was inspired by the real life story of Asta Philpot.

Things do not go as planned when Lars relapses, another stage in his terminal illness. Not to be deterred the three come up with another plan, inadvertently hiring a female ex-convict Claude (Isabelle de Hertogh), the three set off for a life changing trip.

The film is never played for either straight laughs, although there is comedy there, nor is it a film which pities the boys. Their situation is allowed to play out in a very natural way, including the families desire to protect them to the point of stopping them actually living their lives and the boys desire to experience all that the world has to offer.

It is a testament to the actors’ abilities; none of the actors share the disabilities with their characters, that they are able to portray the boy’s predicament with such sensitivity. Philip (Robrecht Vanden Thoren) is a prickly paraplegic, the partially sighted Jozef (Tom Audenaert) is both childlike and manipulative, but the best performance is given by Gilles De Schryver (Lars) who is terminally ill.

The three are just as crass and insensitive as anyone else their age. When they discover that Claude is a large unattractive woman, rather than the male they were expecting they treat her badly, thinking that she can only speak French and not understand their Flemish

I was only provided with a screener, but the PR blurb reports the final disc will have a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio Track, with optional English subs and a bunch of extras, which I obviously didn’t get. My copy only had a 2.0 audio track, with burned in subs and a print that was frankly not that great, soft and a little washed out. The quality was better than a VHS (ask your parents), but certainly not up to DVD quality.

In the end the film is less about disability than it is about facing up to life, both its pleasures and its pains. Whilst the film was well worth watching the presentation let it down. However, if the final product lives up to the PR blurb, it will be well worth checking out.

7

Charles Packer