Marc (Melki) and Beatrix (Tedeschi) take their teenage son Charly (Romain Torres) and daughter Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou) to Portugal for their summer holidays. When the Laura leaves with a biker to explore the countryside, the bored Charly invites his gay friend Martin (Edouard Collin) to stay, which ignites homoerotic tendencies in Marc. While Marc is struggling with his sexuality, Beatrix conducts an affair with her secret lover who arrives in Portugal looking to woo her away from her family.
There are two ways you can look at Cockles And Muscles; one could be a delightful and heart-warming French farcical romantic comedy and the other could be the worst episode of El Dorado ever written when the scriptwriters tried to include a poor, indulgent homosexuality sub plot to boost the ratings. The tendency is to see the latter. The characters don't really feel anything for each other; Marc is cold and distant, Beatrix is too laid back to care about anything, Charly doesn't have anything to do but walk around and only Jean-Marc Barr as Marc's love interest has any solidity. It does look beautiful, however, as the two directors couldn't advertise renting a house in Portugal for the summer any better than they did here; sprinkling every frame with bright, fun colours. It's just a shame they couldn't translate that to the pages of the script. Flighty, whimsical, inconsistent and ultimately boring, Cockles And Muscles won't turn you on to foreign cinema and if you're already an aficionado, you've probably seen a lot better movies than this.
