Block Pass (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for every bike stunt or race
Take a Drink: every time the teens get up to shenanigans
Do a Shot: whenever someone is caught in the act
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Block Pass follows two French teenagers who’ve grown up fast friends on the dirt bike course their fathers built together before one of them passed. Now the one with the surviving father is a magnetic champion-to-be, even if it seems he’s never quite good enough for his Dad’s expectations, while the other is quieter and more interested in mechanics. The former has a secret that the latter stumbles on one night, though, which changes everything.
A Toast
This is another film about rural French youth from this year’s festival, but this one focuses on dirt-biking obsessives, a family and social environment where homosexuality wouldn’t be understood, much less tolerated (woops, spoilers, not like you didn’t guess it from that description outright). The only thing that comes between these lifelong friends when this is discovered is the fact that there was any secret at all, not the whole gay thing, but that’s a temporary setback. When the secret becomes public, though, and their world starts to fall apart, the film amasses a terrible power.
Everything from this point forward becomes incredibly compelling, as the main characters are each put into their corners and respond to it in their own impulsive, hurt, defensive ways, making decisions that they may never, or can never come back from.
Beer Two
It’s probably not this film’s fault that I just finished watching like four tales of youthful ennui in various Romance language-speaking locales, but there is undeniably a type of drama that catches film festival programmers’ eyes, and this is very much it. It’s a template that Block Pass doesn’t stray terribly far from, especially in its first half, although to not take too much credit away, it’s a successful one to emulate. The visit to the Medieval tapestry museum isn’t something you’d see in a film set anywhere else, at least.
Verdict
Block Pass takes its time building, but when it does it’s to a devastating parable about the bondage of a blinkered masculine worldview.
