My Little Loves

A French film about a boy of thirteen. Daniel lives with his grandmother in a village in the south. He goes to school, cycles, and spends a great deal of time watching other people. Then his mother sends for him. She lives in Narbonne with a Spanish man, and the flat is small. School is not mentioned again. He is put to work in a bicycle repair shop as an apprentice, and that is the end of his education without anyone announcing it. From there the film is a year of nothing much. The shop, the street, the cinema, older boys who know things, and girls he watches and occasionally touches. The mother is not cruel and not warm. She has very little money and no plan for him, and the film does not accuse her. What the narrative is interested in is not adolescence but waiting: the boy is at an age where nothing is decided and everything is being decided, and the film films that as a kind of boredom. The camera almost never moves. Scenes are held long after the point has been made, and the acting is deliberately flat. The cinematography is by Néstor Almendros and the light is the best thing in the film. It is autobiographical. Jean Eustache took the story from his own childhood, and it was his second feature after a much longer and more famous one; it was received poorly at the time and looked at again later. Martin Loeb plays Daniel, with Ingrid Caven as the mother. Who it is for: anyone who likes French cinema of the 1970s at its most patient. Who it is not for: anyone who needs a story; the film refuses drama on principle and some of the scenes with girls sit badly now.