Another franchise in the French coming-of-age industry. Semi-autobiographical, bien sûr, nosing around the same territory that Diane Kurys scoured earlier in Peppermint Soda and Entre Nous. An eight-year-old girl bursts through a closed door and smack into a deadly silence in a tiff between mère and père: everyone freezes, and a wistful solo piano expounds on the situation. Ah. Then it's off to the seashore with the nursemaid, for a summer vacation with aunt and uncle, nieces and nephews. Then come diary entries from the elder daughter, Frédérique, a.k.a. Diane Kurys ca. 1958 ("Sometimes, when he's close, my heart stops"). Childish pranks (tossing laxatives into the goldfish pond, etc.). Eskimo kisses with Mother. First kiss with a boy. And the littlest nephew learns to tie his shoelace. It all adds up to a chapter of childhood of the type apt to be more indelible in private memory than on public screen -- not counting, of course, the quasi-Bergmanesque spectacle of Dad pounding Mom's head on the floor while their thirteen-year-old girl threatens to cut her own throat with a shard of broken mirror. With its pallid, pastel image and attractive but untaxed cast, this remembrance of things past is not likely to make any new memories; not likely to add to anyone else's. Nathalie Baye, Richard Berry, Zabou. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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