Friends

In Paris, Paul, an English boy living with a rich and inattentive father, meets Michelle, an orphaned French girl who has just come to stay with her cousin. Paul is fifteen and Michelle fourteen, and both of them feel alone at home. They run away together and settle in an abandoned cottage by the sea. A child is born to them there. Lewis Gilbert's film drew a great deal of attention in 1971, and the music Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote for it was a success of its own. The same film would not be made the same way now: given how the relationship between two children is handled, how the camera looks at them, and their ages, it sits in an uncomfortable place. Much of whatever value the production has today comes out of that argument.