Summer’s just arrived, baseball season is starting, and the little league players of a small town in southern Quebec are not just hitting balls, but puberty — and they’re hitting it hard. Director Alexandre Dostie sets the wild, offbeat, and sexually charged tone of his 2016 Toronto International Film Festival-winning debut short straight away. “Mutants” opens with throbbing punk music and a scene of young male initiation (involving masturbating on bread) that will have you squirm with disgust or squeal with delight. Trust me, there’s nothing milquetoast about it.
Comprised of a bunch of awkward ragtag outsiders with missing teeth, bleached mullets, and bursting pimples, the Mutant baseball players aren’t much to look at. Their foul mouthed, lawnmower-riding paraplegic coach couldn’t give a damn — his goal is to whip them into winning shape for the season. But from the first practice pitch, things start to go awry, with the ball whizzing back and giving the meanest black eye to pitcher Keven Guénette. Having half your face bruised at the beginning of summer is definitely a bummer, especially when you’re trying to impress the girls on your team. Dostie knows that stress is the heart of his film and so we see the rest of the story through Keven’s eye(s). He scans the freckles on the face of his redheaded crush, pans over her leg as she picks and eats her dead skin, and longs for that tortured first kiss like it’s the only thing that matters in this world.
Now mutated, albeit temporarily, Keven begins to resemble a younger version of his coach — they sport similar mullets and harbor the same hopeless romanticism. Dotsie wanted audiences to draw parallels, believing “they are strange creatures in the eyes of their [peers], disgusting and enticing at the same time.” However, Keven has only been beaten physically and has yet to experience the full brunt of emotional abuse that has threatened his coach from a lifetime of living. The curveball pitch from the beginning sets more in motion than just a black eye and a kiss to be fulfilled, Dotsie says, “It’s a warning to teenagers, like my passionate and tortured 13-year-old self. If you think achieving this first love – crystallizing it in this first kiss – was hard, you ain’t seen shit.”
Startling, funnny, and devastating, “Mutants” is a short you will remember and so it’s appropriate that it begins with a telling quote from the Boston Red Sox’s Johnny Pesky: “It’s such a simple game and it’s so hard to play.”
Check out more of Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premieres here.
And, if you're a creator, Vimeo offers creators tools for video hosting, a text-based video editor, timeline editing features, video graphics capabilities, and an image-to-video converter.
