Erste Liebe

Pierre-Michel Beck and Marina Vlady are excellent in this ' lost ' film and the only way it can be seen is on YouTube and there are no English subtitles. This is hard going if viewers do not understand Italian but well worth the effort. Beck plays the fifteen year old son of a man with power and influence, and he does not feel any affection from his father. He turns to a girl of his own age played with disarming innocence by Vlady and the two fall in love. He feels more at home with her and her father and inevitably Vlady is pregnant with his child. My one criticism of this well acted film is that there is not enough concentration on the lovers, but more on the squabbling between Beck's father and his wife, and the scenes between them were so loud I had to turn down the sound. To add to this Vlady's adored and adoring father is imprisoned for fraud and we have a lot of dialogue about that. No spoilers but the scenes between the lovers is so tender and the ending so moving that I was deeply moved. No masterpiece, but see it if possible as the snowball fight and the scene with the lovers in a cave are expertly made. More of this would have raised the film to a higher level, but that would have meant cutting down somewhat on interior scenes that in my opinion become monotonous.