Jacqueline Dufranne

Pialat's portrait of contemporary France mocks prosperity as a substitute for social and sexual revolution (imdb)

A study of minor events in the adolescence of a boy growing up in small towns. Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after one year of high school, has to go to live with his mother in the south of France. She is living in a tiny apartment with her lover Jose, a Spanish farm worker. Daniel would like to continue school, but his mother cannot afford it, so she sends him to in a moped repair shop. Daniel wiles away his time in the shop, and learns about girls from the other boys in town. (imdb)

Made in 1971 for French TV, this epic film comes from early in the Pialat's belated feature-filmmaking career. It begins in costume drama and an ethnographic view of rural French life during World War One, and in an apparently sentimental tale of war orphans. But then it irises out from costume drama conventions into the transcendental, exploring Pialat*s spiritual themes, as well as the social dynamics, trauma and collective experiences of war. (KG)