My Little Loves

MY LITTLE LOVES   **1/2

Jean Eustache

1974

IDEA:  Sent by his grandmother to live with his mother for a year in the city, the pubescent Daniel falls in with a crowd of older boys. 

BLURB:  My Little Loves is sort of an anti-coming-of-age film, in that its pubescent protagonist goes from a budding sociopath who rubs up against a girl at mass to, by the end of a languid two hours, a budding sociopath who smokes a cigarette and more unashamedly feels up a girl. Played by the gangly, wide-eyed yet impassive Martin Loeb, Daniel is at once an unassuming delinquent and a sullen cypher, like a more taciturn Antoine Doinel, or Laurent Chevalier from Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. Eustache’s austerely minimalist, deliberately stilted Bressonian style is an odd fit for material like this, sapping a portrait of childhood of its characteristic nervous energy and excitement, leaving instead a sense of glacial, almost monotonous drift. If the director’s intent was to convey the indeterminacy of this phase of growing up, he only partly succeeds, and more because of the hauntingly elliptical blackouts that punctuate most of his scenes than anything in the writing or the acting. Rather, the pleasures of My Little Loves are granular and sensory, largely attributable to the lush, limpid cinematography of Néstor Almendros, who spins visual poetry out of even the most meandering episodes of this curiously static quasi-bildungsroman.