The French have a special knack for telling naturalistic, intimate stories. The nation’s treasured André Téchiné has been due for a strong film, since his post-2000 output (with the exception of Witness) has been leaving too much to be desired. To fill this void and remind everyone why some hail him as the greatest post-New Wave director, Téchiné focuses on the youthful crossroads of desire in Being 17 in order to capture the complexity of a relationship between two boys. From mutual animosity to forced friendship to the awakening of something neither expect, Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Tom (Corentin Fila) evolve through an expertly paced 2 hours on screen in ways that should leave audiences celebrating the spirited farrago of youth.

The lively beautiful rush of the opening credits create a comforting ease that’s usually attributed to someone who’s got a world of experience to work with. “Here is a director who knows what he’s doing, put your trust in him and enjoy this emotional ride,” they seem to say as the scenic country setting whizzes by over glorious music. The vibrancy of the opening foreshadows the tone that will go on to pervade over the entire film and the tense push-and-pull dynamic between Damien and Tom. They’re schoolmates, a couple of high-school loners who get picked last for basketball practice, and who—for no discernible reason—become enemies.

Tom lives in the mountains with his adoptive mother Christine (Mama Prassinos) and father Jacques (Jean Fornerod), and is in a constant state of detached ambivalence with the world around him, feeling assuaged only when swimming naked in the lake or tending to the farm animals. Damien lives with his mother, Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain), the country doctor with a heart of gold, while his father Nathan (Alexis Loret) is on active tour duty as a helicopter pilot. Damien practices defensive techniques with neighbor Paulo (Jean Corso), an old-school vet and friend of his dad’s, and loves to cook meals for his mom. When Marianne gets called in to see a sick Christine, she takes a liking to the quiet and polite Tom, who pays her with a chicken in the film’s first organic laugh-out-loud moment.

When it’s discovered that Christine is pregnant with another child, a surprise considering the many miscarriages she had to endure before adopting Tom, Marianne suggests that Tom stay with her and Damien after school, in order to get his grades back up and not lose three hours commuting from the farm. Reluctantly the two boys agree to this arrangement, but tensions escalate until they decide to fight it out once and for all on a mountaintop. When the rain interrupts them mid-fight, however, they seek refuge in a cave and share a sneaky joint in silence. That’s when something shifts in the atmosphere.

Téchiné, and co-writer Celine Sciamma (the writer/director of the excellent Girlhood) have a gracefully raw cinéma vérité approach to their subject, creating a sense of effortless familiarity and attachment with the two leads. It reminded me of Blue Is The Warmest Color in many ways, but most of all in its agenda-free approach to the theme of homosexuality; without putting it in your face (in contrast to, for example, how it’s done on the small screen in American shows like Sense8). There’s no preaching and no politics here; just organic evolution of confused teenage feelings, and super strong character-building, blossoming into something fundamentally universal. Klein is the more experienced of the two young actors in the lead, and while he is undoubtedly strong, the revelation is Fila, who makes his screen debut with subtle ferociousness and irresistible charismatic presence. Of the adults, Kiberlain gets to the do most and she is wonderful as the lonely, warm-hearted, motherly Marianne.

The story’s build-up and progression in the first two thirds of Being 17, laced with intelligent and spontaneous humor, is rock-solid. It’s when we get into the third trimester that faith gets lost, thanks to some see-through conventional plot engineering and a roundabout focus on Marianne. The closing moments as well break the naturalistic spell with an overloaded dose of sugary optimism, in stark contrast to the rest of the film’s prudence. But even with its noticeable rough edges, Téchiné’s film breathes with a poetic temperance; a beautifully structured, finely acted ballad on teenage angst and passion.

The Swiss entry into this year’s Foreign Language Film race at the Academy Awards, Sister could work almost as a companion piece to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s masterful The Kid With A Bike. This one also centers itself on a small, stubborn and determined parentless young boy who strikes out on his own, gets into some criminal behavior and develops a surrogate mother/son relationship with a woman he meets by chance. Here, the boy is Simon and is played with remarkable maturity by Kacey Mottet Klein. Simon is well beyond his years, having to grow up quick in order to provide a living for himself and his sister, portrayed by Lea Seydoux. The two live near a ski resort, and every day Simon heads to the top of the slopes in order to steal equipment from those spending their vacation here so that he can profit from selling it off himself.

Directed by Ursula Meier, Sister has clear influences from the Dardenne brothers, particularly in its shooting style. The camera stays close on the characters almost at all times, often giving a documentary feel to its examination of the two of them and their relationship with one another. There’s a shaky subplot with a kitchen worker played by Martin Compston and a much better one with Gillian Anderson’s wealthy resort guest, but the primary focus of the picture remains on Simon and his relationship with his sister Louise.

The two have grown up with one another and spend their days trying to get by, but as Simon has grown more responsible and composed, sacrificing himself every day in order to provide, Louise is nothing but a burden — she relies on Simon for practically everything, spending most of her time with a bevy of men that she picks up and leaves with for days at a time. The co-dependent relationship between the two of them is further put to the test as Simon’s actions begin to receive unwarranted attention and he grows increasingly jealous of the attention that Louise gives to the other men in her life.

Klein’s performance matches his character in being far beyond his years, perhaps even eclipsing the brilliant work from the young Thomas Doret in that similarly told Dardenne picture, but the standout here has got to ultimately be Lea Seydoux. As a young woman struggling with the burdens of moral responsibility and a yearning desire to just be free and wild, there is always more working beneath her exterior than she lets on and when we finally begin to see her facade crack in the later stages, a character who started off quite unlikeable is quickly turned into one I felt great sympathy for.

There’s a whopper of a twist that I wasn’t expecting at all, but I felt it wasn’t utilized as well as it could have been; however, it does add a whole new level to Seydoux’s brilliant work here and makes you re-examine every stroke of her superb performance that came before it. Sister contains two physical fight scenes between Simon and Louise throughout the film, and in the contrast of them you can see the extensive rift that has grown between them over these events. At the beginning, they are playful and loving, rolling around on the floor while jokingly fighting each other for who can have the best sandwich that Simon stole. The later fight though, is violent and dirty, taking place in the filthy mud and featuring the two going at one other with an almost homicidal rage.

The relationship between the two characters at the center here is fascinatingly explored by Meier, but also impressive is the way that she inserts a subtext with the high/low nature of the setting. There’s a very distinct contrast between the clean, white and beautiful setting of the resort that Simon ascends to each morning and the bleak, muddy and ugly bottom of the hill he returns to every night. Not only does the opposing nature provide a look into the class distinction that Meier softly examines, but it also keys into the lost nature of these wandering figures, constantly striving for something more than the squalor they truly exist in. This all adds an impressive extra layer to Sister, while never becoming such a focus that it takes attention away from the true centerpiece which remains the study of this powerful relationship between a brother and sister.