Fifteen year old Pauline is spending her summer vacation at the coast with her older cousin Marion. Marion is sexy and getting a divorce. They run into Marion's old friend surfer Pierre who introduces them to divorced father Henri. Pierre is desperate to get together with Marion but she rejects him for Henri. Pauline and young surfer Sylvain get together.Amanda Langlet who plays Pauline actually looks to be 15. She's walking around in a skimpy bikini and trying to understand the stumbling sexual connections of the adults. There is one scene where Pierre gropes sleeping Pauline that plays more and more disturbing. My biggest problem is the static staging where the characters are frozen discussing whatever. It needs more movement in various scenes. Langlet has a steady presence although it would be great to have more explosive energy. The adults are lost which is disconcerning and Pauline is more adult than them.

Pauline is 15 and she is spending her summer vacation in Granville with her older, sexually precocious cousin Marion. All Pauline has on her mind is spending time at the beach and if there are boys there, so much the better. To Pauline, they're nice but not indispensable, at least until she meets Sylvain ... and even then. Marion, on the other hand, likes to flirt, first with her ex-boyfriend Pierre and then with Henri, an older ethnologist who is something of a womanizer. The film, of course, is Eric Rohmer's PAULINE A LA PLAGE, one of his Comedies and Proverbs, and since we are in Rohmer-land there is a lot of talk, all of it interesting, all of it intelligent and a lot of sexual to-ing and fro-ing and many complications before matters resolve themselves and it ends just as it begins. Indeed this is one of the few Rohmer pictures in which people actually go to bed together rather than just talk about it. And, of course, it's funny in the way that great comedies should be funny, the gentle humour stemming from the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Indeed this, like so many other Rohmer pictures, is just about perfect and it's perfectly played by another of Rohmer's splendid ensembles, (Arielle Dombasle as Marion is another of Rohmer's great addle-headed heroines). A masterpiece.

In the end of summer, strikingly beautiful and intelligent Marion who just got divorced brings her 15 year old cousin Pauline to a Normandy coastal resort for a short vacation. At the beach, they meet Pierre, an old friend who is still desperately in love with Marion, and Henri, an older hedonist who is only interested in sex and divides his time between Marion and a local candy girl, Louisette. Paulette meets a young man Sylvian but their romance does not live long thanks to Henry's cynicism and egotism. "Pauline at the Beach" is a very sexy, intelligent, and charming dramedy about love, lies, and desire and how sometimes the teenagers have a better sense of reality and better understanding of these matters than the adults around them.

Pure Rohmer essay on love and relationships. What I find very interesting about Rohmer's film is that you can always think back and apply some aspect of the story to your own life. Difficult break-ups, being in love with someone who doesn't love you or worst, who loves someone you consider an idiot. Just like Pierre is having difficulty explaining that it's not jealousy if he doesn't want Marion to get hurt by getting involved with Henri. Love, when you think of it, is one of the most difficult thing to explain. Actually, can you explain it? Sometimes, the obvious for one is not the obvious for another. And the "naïveté amoureuse" of the other can make someone go crazy.The dialogs in this movie - and there's quite a few - are intelligent, well thought by the director. Some themes that I noted: in love, you share everything, even the suffering; perfection is oppressing; love is a type of illness. Each sentence of the script can practically be dissected.A final word: I liked the performance given by Arielle Dombasle. She reminds me of Pascale Ogier in another great Rohmers film, "Les Nuits de la pleine lune", that came out one year later.80/100 (***)Seen at home, in Toronto, on November 14th, 2004.