Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

fedor8 NP is about the rampant alienation in modern Capitalist Western society, and the gradual destruction of the once-compact family unit, through greed, materialism, and loss of spirituality. It's a heart-felt, and indeed heart-wrenching, look at the struggles involved in late adolescence on one hand, and the sense of disorientation of a middle-aged cow, on the other. Furthermore, the concept of the-Just kidding... Yes, this is a French movie in more ways than one.Nuage Proprietage is basically just a relatively dull, quite pointless family drama, and yet from the start it is chock-full of little kinky surprises: perversions that we're so accustomed to seeing from Euro-trash directors these days. Huppert is taking a shower, while one of her twin sons is peeing, standing only a meter away from her. I half-expected them to have sex (knowing full-well that incest and/or sodomy and/or bestiality have odds at around 50-50 of occurring in any given European movie - even more so when it's held in high esteem by Les Critiques Filmeaux), turning NP into yet another excuse for taboo-breaking hence "artistic" cinema.But no, there is no incestual theme here. I guess perhaps the French do this sort of thing on a regular basis: parents and their kids being naked together in the john... A little later on, incest-fans/perverts among the cinema-goers are given a glimmer of yet more hope when Isabelle's male twins bathe together in a very very small bathtub. Did I mention they're 18 years old? No, no, no, ye fans of sexploitation trash cinema, don't get yer hopes up; the siblings do not - thankfully(!!!!) - have sex with each other. Believe it or not, they are not even (physically) attracted to each other, and at least one half of the twinic duo is straight.We find out about the blond twin's heterosexuality through a number of scenes in which he has sex with his pretty girlfriend. I mean, show me good female nudity any time you like, but is there any purpose to these scenes? No. Does it matter to the further plot developments that at least one of the twins likes girls? No. Would the blond twin act any different toward his mother's plans to sell their house if hadn't had a girlfriend? Probably not. (If anything, being sexually unsaturated he'd be even more aggressive against her selling it.) And yet what French movie would be complete without pointless sex scenes? European filmmakers never forget that most critics who write about their precious movies are sex-starved aging nerds, hence once you've titillated them, you assure yourself at least a solid rating.The bizarre nude scenes are just the top of the Pointlessness Pyramid. There is a plethora of scenes that mean absolutely nothing, add nothing to the story, etc. Their only purpose is PADDING. Fill the time somehow because the story is so thin; so basic it would not suffice for a half-hour TV drama, if left to stand on its own, without the silent, pretentious pauses in the plot. Cleverly enough, every brainwashed/lobotomized film student has been indoctrinated to tell you that these pointless scenes are supposed to "aid character development". Yeah, a woman walking on grass for 10 minutes definitely tells me everything about the character... (That she's a cow?...) In fact, padding tells a lot more about the director's pretentious cluelessness than any character here.WHO CARES about a scene in which the twins wrestle, this allegedly showing us that they're "still immature" (as one reviewer put it)? A skillful director/writer does not require a dozen one-minute scenes to describe a character: he can do it in 2 minutes, and if he's really ingenious/inventive he can describe a character sufficiently in even less than that.Remember: so-called "character development" is just another term for "wasting the viewer's precious(?) time". Besides, none of the movie's basic six characters are interesting enough to deserve so much "in-depth" portrayal. These people are neither interesting or weird enough to warrant that kind of effort or time.When you strip away all the BS and take a hard - (and slightly bored) - look at the basics of NP, you must realize that you're dealing with a rather trite plot of whether a woman will sell her house or not! WHO CARES! If I wanted to experience the thrill of watching people decide whether and how to sell their homes I'd have gone into real estate.The ending is as pointless as the basic premise: the blond twin injures the other twin. The love is now gone from the family, the twins' innocence is lost, everyone is emotionally devastated, and allegedly all of this is the blond twin's fault because he was trying to prevent his mother from taking their house away... So very deep.I really like Isabelle Huppert. However, in her later years she has narrowed down her acting technique to giving us the same grumpy poker-face (sounds like an oxymoron, I know) - in almost every single scene. I doubt that she's even capable of playing sympathetic characters anymore. She's starting to display the non-range of Katherine Deneuve, the worst French actress of all time.

RolyRoly As a parent of three children, ages 16 to 20, I can say unequivocally that this wonderfully acted and deftly written and directed little film captures more about the relationships between modern youth and their baby-boomer parents than a dozen sociological tracts or studies could ever hope to achieve. On one level, the two sons are simply over-indulged, self-pitying and foul-mouthed brats, but that is far from the whole story. They are victims too, of a society in which self-fulfillment trumps parental duty and parents think that they can buy the loyalty and affection of their children with money and material goods. Not that this family is especially prosperous - in fact, they live an essentially hand to mouth existence, but still enjoy most of the fruits of modern Western culture - motorbikes, video games, etc. Isabelle Huppert is terrific as the long-suffering mother who is unable to confront her own children for fear of alienating them completely, so much so that she has to recruit a surrogate in an attempt to break through to them. Although the film is set in France the chords it strikes are universal. It makes you angry, frustrated and occasionally just overwhelmed - much like being parent of teenage boys.

writers_reign Isabelle Huppert, who has A-list directors standing in line to work with her is celebrated for her willingness to help new writer-directors by lending her name to attract finance and her presence on set to attract audiences. This can, of course, prove embarrassing - Josie Balasko's first directorial effort Sac de Noeuds didn't exactly set the screen alight but Huppert was right to see the promise which has since been kept over and over - but on the other hand it can result in something as delightful as Aleandra Leclerc's Les Soeurs fachees (Huppert has a new film with Leclerc, Les Mediaturs, in post-production even as we speak). She got it right this time, too, with Joachim Lafosse who probably wouldn't have got this one off the ground without Huppert. Real-life brothers Jeremie and Yannick Renier play Huppert's twin sons who live with her in what was the family home til Huppert divorced their father Patrick Descamps, who has remarried and lives within driving distance with his new wife and child. The French title Nue Propriete, is more specific, a French legal term in which a family member, usually an ex-spouse, is allowed to live in a house but has no legal right to ownership so that they cannot, for example, sell it or take in lodgers. This, in fact is the position in which Huppert finds herself and as it happens she does want to sell, move away with a neighbour/lover and open a B&B. This brings us to the twins, neither of whom appears to have any friends although one has a girl he uses as a sex-object. Long before we, the audience, enter the scene, the boys have become dominant, especially Jeremie Renier who thinks nothing of interrogating his mother daily, verbally abusing her and going through her bag. It goes without saying that her attempt to introduce her lover to the twins is a disaster. This is a cloistered, unhealthy family with Huppert thinking nothing of taking a shower openly whilst one son cleans his teeth two or three feet away; a great deal of screen time is given over to meals, traditionally a time when families come together in harmony but not, of course, here. As usual Huppert gives a Master-Class in Screen acting but there isn't really a bad performance throughout. It's not exactly Feelgood but it is a fine film and worth anyone's time.

Roland E. Zwick The French film, "Private Property," sets up a fierce battle of wills between a divorced mother and the two ne'er-do-well sons (fraternal twins) who still live with her. Pascale wants to sell the house and open up a bed-and-breakfast with her new boyfriend, but the young men, fearing the loss of the property that they believe should rightly go to them, attempt to block any efforts in that direction.With intelligent direction by Joachim Lafosse and incisive writing by Lafosse and Francois Pirot, this low-keyed family drama explores the complexities inherent in filial, sibling and marital relationships. The confrontation scenes, many of which take place during meal times (come to think of it, I don't believe I've seen this much eating in a film since "Babette's Feast"), are sharply drawn and effectively staged. The acting is excellent across the board, particularly that of Isabelle Huppert, as the middle-aged woman determined to finally start living for herself, and Jeremy Renier, as the more belligerent and self-centered of her two sons. Yannick Renier, Jeremy's brother in real life, is also very good as the more passive of the twins.Some viewers may feel let down and frustrated by the inconclusive ending, but I enjoyed the ambiguity of it. We have been made privy to just one brief episode in the lives of these people - then it's time for us to move on.