I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Moving and memorable psychological drama with outstanding performances. This seemingly simple tale tells us a lot about the way social class and background colour not just our habits and tastes, but our very being. And this influence is not always benign : often we become the owners of mindsets that blind us to the value, or the legitimate needs, of others.France is an apt setting for this kind of tale. On the one hand it is a country with a strict, a VERY strict, social hierarchy, on the other hand everybody is supposed to be free and equal (and, of course, very much in favour of freedom and equality). The resulting contradictions, compromises and tensions strew the landscape with snares for the vulnerable. Be warned : the movie is not a cheery one, it contains a deep tragedy. Dutch poet Werumeus Buning once wrote a poem about the life of roses being destroyed not through a storm, but through a soft, tender, delicate rainfall. The context of the poem is different but the image could very well apply to one of the lead characters, who meets good things - love, romance, emotional awakening, a bit of excitement - and, slowly but surely, gets damaged beyond recognition. All together : "The pleasure of love lasts but an instant, the grief caused by love can last a lifetime"...

Beatrice is a very reserved and quiet young woman. Her friend Marylene is left by her lover and brings her to Cabourg (Normandy) for a few days' vacation. There, Beatrice, an apprentice hairdresser, meets Francois, a middle-class intellectual. Francois becomes her first lover, but their social and cultural differences get in the way of happiness.This film is highly praised and indeed it is a pretty good film. Not my favorite, not one I am likely to recommend to others, but a fine film just the same. What I liked most is that the movie says it is okay to be an introvert, to be a wallflower, to be a loner. Other movies might have a shy kid breaking out of their shell, but here we have Beatrice who knows who she is and is (for the most part) very comfortable about it.

The student from Paris and his friends are intellectuals. He reads Le Monde. He is stamped by his background. The girl is in love with love. Everywhere she turns, there is love and passion evident, even through the hotel's thin walls. She only wishes to please and outwardly doesn't project herself as a self-regulated person. Her lower class background is clear before she goes on vacation where she meets the student. Although they stay in the same hotel, this is about the only thing they have in common beside the bed they share, but being removed from their normal lives just delays the obvious. Love is idyllic at first for everyone. She is hopelessly adrift among his friends in Paris and cannot communicate with them. This class based depiction is consistent with how many French view that one's birth divides a person from the other classes. The class-based system exists here in the South, but I have a feeling that passion and love and familiarity more readily breaks down barriers than those 30 years ago in France.This is a movie well worth seeing.

The Lacemaker, 1977, its oblique sexual politics appear dated twenty-five years later. Pascal Laine (author) and Claude Goretta would have us believe that the young male student's callowness leads to heartbreaking tragedy for Huppert's character. Twenty-five years later that assertion seems callow itself, and shallow political nonsense. Healthy young women are not so helpless. I understand the movie as a love story (intimate nudity is substituted for sex, and any love they may have shared we must take on faith) concerning two pathologically depressed people. They are drawn together by their mutual recognition and the hope that the other can alleviate their individual suffering. Of course, they discover that their depression prevents any real intimacy.