Simply A Masterpiece

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The first must-see film of the year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Just exactly what is an 'uncut' version of this movie? Besides the U.K version, which is 86 minutes, I have found the following lengths of the movie: 91 min - http://www.worldwidedvdforums.com/kb.php?mode=article&k=744 91 min - http://www.cinecityplanet.com/E_frame.html?93 min - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076749/ 94 min - http://www.rarefilmfinder.com/showfilm.php?id=222 100 min - http://www.azovfilms.com/proddetail.asp?prod=90014 So, it seems that 'uncut version' must be different things to different people. . .Does anyone know where one could find authoritative facts on what exactly the 'director's cut' of the movie was? Maybe that was never produced into a DVD or VHS - that all editions of the movie are variations of the total footage of the movie.I would suggest that anyone else posting comments should say how many minutes their 'uncut' version was. Comments?

I own this movie & am proud of it. I live in the good old USA and had to buy my copy in Europe, so i could get it uncut, the full 93 min version. This movie may be very controversial, but anybody who can't see past the nudity is very closed minded. This movie is a brilliant piece of art. The forest alone, is worth a million words, not to menchine the story. I'm 19, and had a difficult upbringing, especially in junior high, but this movie nails it, the emotions and feelings that i had as a preteen and young teen. I praise this movie for exploring this difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. Anybody who would call this movie pornography, is ignorant, as far as i'm concerned, at most maybe you could argue that it is mild erotica, but even that is a stretch. When are people going to realize that nudity does not equal pornography, and love making does not always equal sex. Anyway, i have to put in my vote as one of the best coming of age movies that i have ever seen, a 9/10. I have seen a lot of movies, spending a lot of my winters watching movie after movie, I'm a huge movie buff, and through my experience i have found that European movies tend to be a lot more honest about feelings, love, and life in general, then do US movies, where ratings are based on sex and violence. This movie remains a favorite of mine to this day on how brutally honest it protrays this adolescent transition. A must see for anyone who loves art or who is struggling through adolescence.

Having grown up in Amsterdam,Holland, where our liberal ideas are pretty much the norm, I have to say that I cannot understand why this movie caused so many problems when it came out! Sure, it is a movie of the 70's when peace and love were still there amongst a lot of old and younger people in Holland. I saw the film on a good DVD version last year and thought it was a love story about youth, rite of passage and growing up. The music in the background was pretty dire and some of the scenes were a bit dull (what was the snake scene all about??) but generally it wasn't a bad film. If some people get wound up about preteen nudity, then all I can say is they should get a life!!

When Europeans make films about summer holidays, they often view the time and place as liminal zones. Away from home, people are sometimes on some kind of threshold: the first or last happy time, the beginning of maturity, explorations of love, rites of passage. This film is like that. There are only three characters, Laura (Lara Wendel), Fabrizio (Martin Loeb), and Silvia (Eva Ionesco), and the story takes place in the forest near the young people's summer homes. Laura and Fabrizio explore the forest and discover high in the wooded hills a ruined "magic" town. Laura is eager to see him after a year apart, and she notes he has changed: he's sullen and withdrawn and increasingly given to teasing and tormenting her. The sexual tension between them is complicated by Laura's desperate wish to please him and his pleasure in denying her any sort of satisfaction, even conversation or a modest kiss. They find a cave underneath the castle, and lost down there Fabrizio undresses her and they make love. Just that once. And then he's back to his mean ways of frightening her or tantalizing her. This gets still worse when he discovers Sylvia, in some ways Laura's opposite, confident, blonde, mean, and fearless. She and Fabrizio torment Laura some more, in increasingly cruel ways, threatening to banish her, frightening her, shooting arrows at her, pretending to throw her from a cliff, making her serve them, and forcing her to watch them have sex. Fabrizio seems to get steadily worse, obsessed with living in the forest, imploring Sylvia to stay with him. As the summer is about to end and she's set to leave, he takes them into the cave again and tells Sylvia they're lost—and she panics, weeping and saying she'll go crazy and screaming. She can't hear Fabrizio pleading to let their idyll continue. Laura, who feels confused by Sylvia's vulnerability and by her own diffidence (because she knows the way out), comforts the other girl. And Fabrizio kills her, just as he's killed helpless birds already. What starts as an idyllic season succumbs to a corrosive pattern of conflating sex and power, so experimental cruelty is inevitable, and then the pastoral turns Gothic. Sort of. The movie looks wonderful, with gorgeous photography of woods and meadows and ruins, and the three young actors are very nice to look at. Wendel is soft-looking, anxious, expectant, longing—she's the best actor among them. Loeb is not a petulant adolescent, but he seems dissatisfied with things any boy his age would celebrate forever. Ionesco is an odd mixture of radiance and plainness, her golden hair all cloud-like and her skin fine, but her face is also rather ordinary looking from certain angles, and there's something almost unformed and childlike about it, though her ease before the camera makes it difficult to spot (she was the favourite model for her mother, a famous photographer). Wendel appears more attractive because she's more delicate, more hesitant, and more sympathetic. Finally, it would be nice to see a film about young people discovering sex and love and joy without this sour undercurrent of punishment.