At 20, Loïc has already had more sexual partners than most of us will in our entire lives. With a casual air that borders on indifference, he indulges in acts his peers wouldn't even know existed if it weren't for the Internet (or movies like this). Loïc thinks he's a man, but as everyone around him can see, he's still just a stupid boy -- or ''garçon stupide,'' as the Swiss might say. He mistakes his own boredom for a sign of maturity.

What Loïc doesn't understand is that nature gives us the capacity to behave sexually before it gives us the brains to recognize how to manage those impulses. It's easy for parents to pretend their teens don't think about sex, but the truth is, sex is probably the only thing on their minds most of the time. (If Garc¸on Stupide is any indication, parents would learn a lot about what their teenagers are up to if they'd only check their kids' camera phones from time to time.)

As far as quote-unquote gay movies go, Lionel Baier's gutsy French-language debut is philosophically much more ambitious than its competition, although audiences may be frustrated by how much the movie leaves unspoken. Between explicit sex scenes, Baier expects us to extrapolate what Loïc is feeling while the boy himself is trying his hardest to make the world believe he's impervious to emotion.

Baier's style is almost uncomfortably voyeuristic, amplified by the casting of a young, inexperienced actor (Pierre Chatagny) in a part that calls for hardcore sex. To complicate matters further, Baier himself appears as one of Loïc's recurring suitors, Lionel (whose face we never see). But Lionel isn't like Loïc's other tricks. Instead of jumping straight to the sex, he insists on getting to know this impatient young kid.

In a way, Lionel functions as the audience's on-screen surrogate. He's attracted, possibly even aroused by Loïc, but he has no intention of seducing the boy. The movie is deliberately crafted so that its gay male audience can root for handsome young Loïc to realize that there's more to life than casual sex while vicariously enjoying the numerous trysts it takes before he reaches that conclusion.

The material itself is at least partially autobiographical, blending Baier's own experience with his lead actor's private life into a kind of fictionalized memoir. It's brave of both Baier and Chatagny to put so much of themselves into the picture. Without their personal touch, it's unlikely that we'd be quite so willing to sympathize with such a self-involved ''stupid boy,'' but there's a raw honesty to both the performance and the material that resonates. Such candor elevates the material from simply being a series of X-rated exploits to a far more insightful story about how the path to manhood is paved with selfish mistakes, some far more regrettable than others.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]