"Complices" is a rather depressing work ,depicting a world which is exploiting the young ones ,treating them as sexual objects :it's revealing that two "clients" are a (female) lawyer and an ophthalmologist.The two miserable heroes come from difficult backgrounds:we never see Vincent's parents and the boy lives in a trailer with his pimp ,a jealous gay who cannot stand his girlfriend Rebecca.As for the girl ,she is left to her own devices ,her mother being almost always absent and she's hardly eighteen (we learn she is to take her HS diploma this year).The boy prostitutes himself and he leads Rebecca into bad ways ( the bisexual clientèle).Not exactly the romantic story of your dreams.Although the director does not spare the sordid details ,partly thanks to his actors (particularly Descours ,who remains natural and whose youthful look reveals a shattered innocence -the actor was 26 ,whereas he is supposed to be 19 in the movie) he makes his principals endearing.
The movie is a long flashback but,and it is the director's main quality,we never have the feeling of watching flashbacks .It's so rare in the movies it has to be underlined : present and past are so tightly linked that we have the strange feeling that Rebecca and her dead lover are still living their love story while the two cops are investigating.
This is not the rosy world of Eric Rohmer.It's a cruel world ,the world of those "dirty" sites on the net ,of the double life of the prostitutes and their clients .The boy ,eating candies after making love with a (probably) well-respected man ,shows the child still inside of him.As for Rebecca ,who is not a very attractive girl,she's naively looking for someone to love .Par excellence doomed lovers.However, the ending is finally ,in its own particular way,some kind of happy end ,and ,it's another quality of the movie,the cops are not caricatured and show some compassion.
