Come As You Are

Three friends are in their twenties. Philip is paralysed and can move only his head. Lars is in a wheelchair because of a brain tumour. Jozef is blind. None of them has had any sexual experience, and they learn of a brothel in Spain that serves disabled clients. Their families will not hear of it. They invent a wine tour, hire a minibus and set off. Claude, who drives, is a hard woman who is unmoved by all three. Geoffrey Enthoven directs. It is a Belgian production. The starting point is a real person: Asta Philpot, from Britain, made a similar journey, and it became the subject of a documentary. The fiction here comes from that. The attitude the narrative takes is not pity; the characters are merciless with each other, they joke and they argue. The matter it treats is the limit of caring; the families cannot see the difference between protecting and preventing, and the narrative says so directly. It uses the shape of a road film, and the ease of that shape carries the weight of the subject. It won audience awards at festivals and did better business in Belgium than expected. Who it is for: viewers who like road films with hard humour and drama that does not turn its subject into emotional exploitation. Who it is not for: some of the jokes are heavy, the ending is emotional, and the narrative follows the expected stages of its genre.