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.

Rohmer's version of the intricacies of love,life and adulthood,in general,makes for a great introduction to the French New Wave in one's late teens,probably. People and specific faces have always been Rohmer's staple issues and yet every time he does it with such a great deal of novelty. A love story 'between' 4,strike that,5 people(the candy girl is no less a part of the ensemble than Pauline herself) is not easy to conceive and much less, execute on camera. The excess in dialogue is perhaps the most un-Rohmeresque aspect of this number. A couple of performances perhaps were a bit out of tune with the rest of the cast's inputs. Sylvain,perhaps could have been better played by La Brosse. But the film,to my mind,is certainly not the best to have emerged from the Eric Rohmer factory.

Out of the 50 films he has made this is only the third title of Rohmer that I've seen. I recently decided that with several titles available on DVD I should try to catch up on his back catalogue. It didn't bode well that I fell asleep halfway through this one and had to play it again. It seems fairly obvious - and is confirmed to some extent by the comments one reads about him - that Rohmer is a filmmaker who has a definite world of his own which attracts a polarity of opinion. There seems little room for polite indifference here it's either as outstanding as Orson Welles or as pathetic as Baz Luhrmann. With a long way to go, certainly in my case, I would argue that a middle ground IS possible; a second viewing did hold my attention and I was unable to fault his observation. On the other hand I find that this kind of 'gentle', unobtrusive film-making works better, for me at least, in movies like Le Chignon d'Olga and Le Grande Chemin. Having said that I will certainly make it a point to catch more Rohmer in the future.

Pauline just manages to keep her place in the center of this film, and how nice that is. Her indecisive cousin, a Rohmer type, almost takes over the film with a great figure. The two men are as unreliable as Rohmer's men always are. Pauline, though, is just the acute teen age observer that one can really love. Her boyfriend shows a lot of rectitude too.This film is a kind of testament to whatever it is in teenagers that makes most of them survive fairly intact, incredible though that survival may be in retrospect. A sweet Rohmer film, and my favorite.A cute touch is Pauline's two bathing suits - the one that is barely there shows the gawky but unselfconscious teen ager she is, and the modest one suggests the sexy woman she will soon decide to be.Rohmer's work, even more than most good directors, is a series of essays on a single theme. This one gives more hope that women and men may be able to live together than most of the others do. Still I think Rohmer remains puzzled about how the sexes coexist.