Come As You Are

Representing the best in offbeat, audience friendly entertainment, this road movie follows three twenty-something handicapped Belgian men who decide to defy their disabilities and visit a Spanish brothel that caters to men with special needs. Telling their worried families that they are going on a wine tour, they hire a van and driver/nurse, but things don’t exactly go as planned.

Genial Jozef (Tom Audenaert) is almost completely blind. Prankster Philip (Robrecht Vanden Thoren) is a paraplegic. Likewise wheelchair-bound, Lars (Gilles De Schryver) has a degenerative terminal illness that is causing paralysis and occasional fits. As they start off, Philip and Lars take an antagonistic tone with their driver Claude (Isabelle De Hertogh), a nurse with some secrets in her past, but eventually all parties arrive at a mutual respect.

The film was loosely inspired by Briton Asta Philpot’s real-life trips to a wheelchair-accessible Spanish brothel and his advocacy of prostitution as one sexual-expression option for the disabled. Never overplaying obvious emotional cues, filmmaker Geoffrey Enthoven (The Over the Hill Band) burnishes his reputation for deft directing and spot-on performances, even as his subject matter alternates between comedy and serious drama. See it now before the American remake.