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Street Boyz
Rating: 4 Stars
Centaur Films. Produced, written, and directed by Jean-Daniel Cadinot. Videography by Manuel Fernandez. Music by Buddy Studson Zadek, Jr. Starring Guilhem Thomas, Youri Sakarine, Antoine Mory, Rodolphe Vernier, Vincent Garnier, Karl Forst, Jonathan Prevost, Mathias Torello, Axel Altman, and Claude Menard.
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Insatiable, the Jean-Daniel Cadinot production previously released in the U.S. by Centaur Films, was undermined by a crude attempt to replace its original French dialogue with dubbed American English. Here, the original soundtrack survives. There's a smattering of spoken English, sometimes amusingly mangled by Russian tourist Youri Sakarine ("I need go Paris. Can you arrive me?"), but most of the words are in French with deftly composed English subtitles. Happily, there's no misguided effort to Americanize the thoroughly European cast.

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I>Macadam, the original French title, should have been retained. Street Boyz misleadingly suggests hustlers, gang members, Boyz N tha Hood. This is actually a kaleidoscopic, structurally complicated piece of road-porn where most of the characters are young middle-class white men on the move. The principals include the Russian tourist, a military parachutist on leave (Guilhem Thomas), a yuppie in a yellow convertible (Claude Menard), a cop (Antoine Mory) who shakes down young guys in cruising areas and abandoned warehouses, and a well-heeled, French-born Dutch citizen (Karl Forst).

The story begins at De Gaulle airport, near Paris, and makes headlong progress toward Cannes. Along the way, the characters' paths intersect, merge, and diverge. In the course of 110 minutes, there are nine expertly paced, radiantly lascivious sex scenes. The models are slim, with dancers' physiques. Standout moments include Mory's brief encounter with delectable Jonathan Prevost in the back of a camion, and a three-way staged behind a garden wall as traffic whizzes past a few feet away. You may wish for a stronger ending, and wince at a few annoying jump cuts, but for the most part Street Boyz simply shows that in orchestrating sex for the camera, Cadinot has few peers.