L'année des méduses

Not for everyone: one could almost dismiss it as a soft sexploitation movie from the eighties. But no.

This is about an obsessive little girl who is turning into a woman. The characters around her are here to reflect the wicked light she is shining, and emphasize facets of her personality, as she is wrecking havoc around her.

It is all then about the sexual desires of women and men. How they cheat. Whom they love. What it is that they want. What they would do to get it. Only one character is "not normal " in this movie, and this is the scary part: all the others could be us to some degree.

One flaw in this movie: the voice-over on two occasions. Obviously the director could not find a way could convey the message. Pity. Otherwise, it would have a perfect little venomous movie.

A tedious, drawn out film about rich French people lounging on the beach, screwing each other and playing social power games.

Main character is a narcissistic teenage girl who likes to manipulate and seduce people.

None of the characters are likeable and are hardly relatable. They are all vapid and sometimes despicable. That is probably the point of the film, but it is difficult to suspend your disbelief when you can't relate to a single character in the film.

The movie did not need to be two hours long. There is probably a combined total 30+ minutes of close-up shots of the lead actress just staring past the camera.

The only redeemable parts about the film are that it does a good job of immersing the viewer in the setting, is sometimes sexy and has good cinematography and editing.

I choose that movie spontaneously. I never heard that movie before and don't know any actor or actress but when I watch I aware that the movie totally touches the emotions about love and relationships belong the family, lovers and humans. On the other hand the time has chosen specifically. Because the side of the sea during the summer love is alive every time. So I love the subject and I started to follow the director's other movies. I believe that I can really find very important character analysis in other movies too. Entirely when you watch that movie just focus on the relationship. Absolutely you will find very unique behaviours. Keep going 👏🏼

Almost every review for this film asks: is this just an excuse to show beautiful topless women? If everyone keeps asking that it's because it is an excuse to show topless women. The only dramatic tension in this soufflé is while Valerie take her top or not? After a while this disappears since she's always topless for most of the film. The story is risible. The mother basically smokes and drinks throughout the movie (and takes her top off as well). The dramatic denouement at the end (don't worry, I won't spoil it) is so underwhelming and filmed in an uninspired manner that you only then realize that the filmmakers were truly only interested in showing topless women. They were too lazy to come up with something else. I like Valerie Kaprisky. There's something bold about her (she's clearly allergic to clothes) but when she has clothes on, one sorta has a hard time noticing her. It's then that one realizes she's ordinary.

This is only a passable thriller I guess, but I found it interesting for several reasons. First, it is surprisingly trashy and unpretentious for a French movie. While the Italians and the Spanish have made tons of movies like this, the French have always seemed more hesitant to make flat-out genre or exploitation movies without a lot of high-art pretensions. This film is a trashy "lethal Lolita"-type flick along the lines of "Pretty Poison" or "The Crush" (or Italian equivalents like "Peccati di gioventu"). The cinematography, however, is quite impressive--up to the high French standards of arthouse films like "Pauline on the Beach" or "One Wild Moment". It helps that, like those movies, it was filmed in a cinematographer's paradise, the south of France. And, of course, it also features the very, um, photogenic Valerie Kaprisky (who is usually topless and often completely nude) as the lethal Lolita. Kaprisky was in some pretty interesting French movies like this and "La Femme Publique" before she was no doubt black-balled for appearing in the horrible Hollywood remake of "Breathless" with Richard Gere. This one is pretty hard to find, but is definitely worth looking for.