Staff Select Premiere: You kissed me and it was like a hit
Summer's just arrived, baseball season is about to begin and the little league players in a small town in southern Quebec aren't just hitting balls but are experiencing puberty- and they're hitting the ball hard. The director Alexandre Dostie sets the wild violent, sexy, and insidious tone of his Toronto International Film Festival winning debut short right away. "Mutants" starts with an eerie punk music and a scene of male young sexual initiation (involving sexually sexy eating bread) which will make your face giggling or laugh out loud with joy. Trust me, there's nothing milquetoast about it.
Made up of rogue outsiders who have missing teeth, bleached mullets, and pimples that are bursting, Baseball players who are mute aren't much to look at. The foul-mouthed, lawnmowers-riding paraplegic coach couldn't give a damn -- his goal is to get them in an ideal shape for the season. From the first pitch, things begin to be a mess as the ball bounces back, and a black eye to pitcher Keven Guenette. Having half your face bruised in the summer's beginning can be a real pain, especially when you're trying to impress the ladies who are on the team. Dostie recognizes that stress is the main theme of his movie and therefore we get to see the remainder of the film from Keven's eye(s). Keven scours the freckles of his redheaded crush, pans over her leg as she eats and picks at her skin that has died, and longs for that brutal first kiss, as if it's the only thing to be concerned about in the world.
The mutated Keven is now undergoing a transformation, though only temporarily, Keven begins to resemble the younger version of his mentor -- they sport similar mullets and harbor the same insanity and romanticism. Dotsie was hoping that viewers would make parallels between them, thinking that "they are strange creatures that are in the eyes of their"peers," appealing and disgusting at the same time." But, Keven has been only battered physically and has yet to experience the complete brunt of emotional abuse that has threatened his coach with a life of living. The curveball pitch at the beginning sets more in motion than a single black eye and a kiss that needs to be fulfilled, Dotsie declares, "It's a warning to teenagers, like my passionate and twisted 13-year-old self. If you think achieving this first love - crystallizing the first kiss - is difficult, you ain't seen shit."
Startling, funnny shocking, hilarious, "Mutants" is a film that you'll remember, therefore it's fitting that it begins with a telling line from Boston Red Sox's Johnny Pesky: "It's such an easy game, and difficult to learn."