In Maurice Pialat's magnificently unsentimental adolescence portrayal, puberty is still an Enfance Nue -- the naked nerves of youth, slapping over a dress, a late-night arrival seguing into titanic shouting fits. For the doleful, 15-year-old heroine (Sandrine Bonnaire), the genteel theatrical performance acted out to a cacophony of frogs in summer camp is no match for the cyclonic drama waiting at home, where no incident is too small to whip up a storm of raw intensity over. Mother (Evelyne Ker) and older bro (Dominique Besnehard) wad in free-flowing hysteria, while Pialat, typically, implicates himself in his characters' miseries by self-casting as the fur-cutting father, who reveals his menopausal crisis and decision to take off to his daughter in a splendid, extended nocturnal talk -- the father's gaze (and, thus, the camera's) remains on Bonnaire's face, as it should be, picking up an entire encyclopedia of emotional curlicues, listening and reacting and shifting. Class-ditching and prematurely "sick of living," she tries to snatch solace in immediate physical contact, random sleeping-around inevitably resulting in emptiness. A lakeside dance lands her in the arms of an American student, her disenchanted "You're welcome. It's free" to his equally flat, post-fuck "Thanks a lot." Purcell swells in the soundtrack as Bonnaire suns herself on a boat or learns of a best pal scooping up a former beau, though the picture is less about bloating teenage angst into mythical proportions than charting the thorny, painful areas where adolescence and adulthood intersect. Bonnaire's marriage for peace, if not happiness, is alluded to in a single cut, while time is stretched as dad crashes a party to expound on Van Gogh, Pagnol and the sadness of life -- the temporal fluctuations illustrate the narrative's trajectory of physical growth and emotional paralysis, crystallized in the heroine's airplane trip overseas intercut with the father's bus ride back, yet already achingly summarized earlier on in Pialat's ad-libbed mumble: "Who cares about her hair… Time flies." Written by Pialat and Arlette Langmann. With Anne-Sophie Maillé, Christophe Odent and Cyr Boitard.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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