How many more art-farty films about aimless young homo gits gliding on auto-pilot through an endless string of anonymous sexual encounters do we need to see? In my experience, they all tell precisely the same story (see previous sentence) explore precisely the same interesting themes (ennui, displacement, detachment and big-city loneliness) in completely uninteresting ways and all deploy precisely the same set of embarrassing film-school gimmicks such as jump-cut editing, unnecessarily unnatural camera angles and various other contrivances to add some sort of flair to texts that are as boring as batshit.

This time around, it's Garçon Stupide (Stupid Boy) a French/Swiss affair about Loïc (Pierre Chatagny), who spends his days working a menial job in a chocolate factory, and his nights (do I even have to say it) trawling through cruising grounds and the internet hunting for sex. He shares a flat with Marie (Natacha Koutchomov) and dreams of being a photographer or maybe moving to Africa. Various conversations take place between strangers, and at one point we're treated to a close-up of a pen in a shirt pocket and Loïc staring at a Ferris Wheel .

Loïc has trouble making friends, and no wonder, since director and co-writer Baier hasn't given him any character traits beyond amorphous dissatisfaction and a sense of vague curiosity in images. At one point Loïc rattles off a list of things that he doesn't want and doesn't want to be and whinges that the options he sees offered to him by life leave him cold. It's a sequence that is much along the lines of Ewan McGregor's opening monologue of Trainspotting, an appropriate connection for a film that has much the same pace and level of excitement of the sport of trainspotting.

In another inter-movie connection, Garçon Stupide is saturated with over wrought operatic music composed by Sergei Rachmaninov, the Russian composer that pushed Noah Taylor into broken-down Geoffrey Rush in Shine. That was a film that did interesting things with the interiority of sullen, confused young men. Garçon Stupide isn't such a film.

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