As You Are Is Uneven and Unrealistic About Guns

What’s at the center of this uneven feature film (beautiful exteriors, but ugly interiors) by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, which is set in the grunge years in a working-class part of a small town that’s in the middle of a forest, and concerns two sexually confused teenage males, their parents (the mother of one teenager is having lots of hot sex with the father of the other), a black girl, and a crime in the pines where sun never shines? It’s guns. The whole story of As You Are—which has two strong performances, and three decent dramatic moments, but is altogether lacking the magic of cinema—is only possible in a society that has little or no gun control.