Erste Sehnsucht

Beautifully photographed, lovely young women, virtually no plot or plot motivations. I guess this is a genre of French cinema. Three young women take a boat out on the sea at night. They are lucky to survive when the boat gets wrecked. One of them lies unconscious on the beach and is rescued by a handsome boy. Soon they are sort of owning the island and having various encounters with some young men they have met. All three, plus a beautiful concert pianist, are hard to take your eyes off of. But at some point it slogs along to where there are no real questions. I watched it because the Criterion Collection included it and I have been picking an choosing from their library of films. This one really turned out to be a waste of time. Lots of standing around, posing, and laughing, and doing little else.

David Hamilton makes movies for all those "perverts" who find 18-year-old girls with perfect bodies sexually attractive (that is, heterosexual men of all ages who aren't actually dead). Personally, I don't buy the hysterical argument that it is a slippery slope from watching a 25-year-old French nudie "art" film like this to attending a Hannah Montana concert in a raincoat to hanging around playgrounds with a pocket full of candy--but even so, unlike some other David Hamilton movies, the four leads here were all over eighteen at the time (if just barely), so let's just admit they look very sexy--whether clothed, unclothed, or somewhere in between--and move on.

I certainly can't fault the photography here (Hamilton's specialty), particularly since he has actually decided to pull the focus all the way for a change so the whole thing doesn't look like an especially murky Impressionist painting. The pace, of course, is VERY slow (I was afraid a new Ice Age would come and I would be run over by a glacier while watching it). The plot could charitably be described as stupid (three girls, playing hooky from their seaside private school, take a raft and wash up on an island where they all decide to surrender their virginity to various locals, or something like that). The dialogue is even worse. And the music is not be spoken of (or listened to if you can avoid it). The acting is not great, but while you'd never know it from her performance here, one of the actresses, Emanuelle Beart, went on to become one of the more famous actresses in France!

I wouldn't really recommend this to most women or to those very moral (and/or very gay) men who find 18-year-old girls icky and disgusting. But most of the reason I like these kind of movies is not the "perversion" factor, so much as the nostalgia factor(i.e. I wouldn't watch something like this if it were made today). However, this movie is so ridiculous and the actresses so unbelievably extraordinarily model-pretty that it really doesn't invoke much nostalgia (for me, anyway--maybe you had a bunch of badly-dubbed, impossibly gorgeous French girls running naked around your neighborhood growing up). In any case--and for what it's worth--this is definitely David Hamilton's "best" movie.

One star for the "plot". One star for the acting. One star for the dubbing into squeaky-voiced American. Five stars for Monica Broeke and Inge Maria Granzow, with their propensity for taking all their clothes off. And ten out of ten for the divine Emmanuelle Béart, two years before she made 'Manon des sources'. Béart also undresses a couple of times, but even fully-clothed her presence is enough to make this film eminently watchable. Watch out for the scene where she tells her friend about the three "first times" for a girl. It's corny, but still far more erotic than the rather laughably choreographed "love scenes" featuring Broeke, Granzow and Patrick Bauchau. Incidentally, the cinematography is not great; the stills for the closing credits are a better indication of what David Hamilton is capable of.

This is typical Hamilton. Gorgeous teenage girls and dreamy photography. I must disagree with one of the comments from another poster saying there is no nudity in the film. He must have seen a cut version. I have to say I don't think the plot or the acting are the strong points of Hamiltons movies. It does feel sometimes like a voyeuristic excuse to present beautiful young women in varying degrees of nudity. This may be quite transgressive of western (specially American) taboos, which equate nudity to porn. Overall a quite unique film. Try to get the uncut version because, quite frankly, the whole point of Hamiltons focus is the female body, (he is mainly a photographer after all)

This film makes you really appreciate the invention of the fast forward button on your remote control. It's exquisite boredom in beautiful pictures. For once Hamilton goes relatively easy on soft focus shots. However, what I found hard to take about the film was that although Anja Schüte was about 19 when it was shot the girls are portrayed as much younger than they actually are. This whole Lolita thing especially as there is an older man involved leaves me rather uneasy. The heroine is actually shaved in the pubic area in order to make her look even younger than she is. Come on, sex is a nice past time- between consenting adults. Another thing I found odd was that neither Beart nor Schüte have a nude scene in the film, well, not a proper one at least.