Mes petites amoureuses (1974)
DVDRip | MKV | 712x572 | x264 @ 2291 Kbps | 117 min | 2,09 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded in MKV)
Genre: Drama
DVDRip | MKV | 712x572 | x264 @ 2291 Kbps | 117 min | 2,09 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded in MKV)
Genre: Drama
Director: Jean Eustache
Writer: Jean Eustache
Stars: Martin Loeb, Jacqueline Dufranne, Jacques Romain
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 a seamstress 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 work as an apprentice in a moped repair shop. Daniel wiles away his time in the shop, and learns about girls from the other boys in town. When he returns to visit his grandmother next year, it is obvious that he has grown up faster than his old friends.
"Mes Petites Amoureuses" is something of a taciturn film that wears a smile (though a sad one) behind the impassive expression of Daniel, its adolescent hero.
Daniel isn't exactly unwanted, but he's nobody's principal concern. He's also a vast reservoir of unexpressed feelings. He spends his time being shuttled between a Paris suburb, where he lives with his loving but preoccupied grandmother, and a small town in southwestern France, where he shares a tiny apartment with his mother and her Spanish lover. Traveling from one home to the other, Daniel carries a small suitcase that looks as if it were made out of cardboard and contained only a change of socks.
"Mes Petites Amoureuses" would initially seem to owe an unconscionable amount of its inspiration to the Truffaut films. Daniel's mother (Ingrid Caven) behaves decently as long as Daniel doesn't make demands that come between her and her lover, who, in turn, isn't unkind to the boy, but neither is he especially interested in him. Though Daniel loves school and its camaraderie, his economically pressed mother doesn't hesitate to force him to get a job instead. Like many coming-of-age films, Daniel is obsessed by sex, and much of "Mes Petites Amoureuses" is devoted to his confused responses to girls, including one wordless (though quite successful) encounter in a movie theater.
Mr. Eustache's narrative method resembles the Truffaut of "Small Change." "Mes Petites Amoureuses" alternates between being anecdotal and simply a record of the observations of a very special sensibility. It's less like a piece of finished fiction than a series of terse, precisely worded entries in a notebook. This is both the style of the film and its charm.
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