I have seen this movie on the German TV yesterday with the title: "A summer at the sea" and I was deeply impressed.

Despite that it was produced in 1990, the theme is more up-to-date than ever. Excellent actors of all ages performed very well indeed, a great story, some romantic spots and lovely music will make you thinking about the relationship of children to their parents, their pain and childish emotions which often get hurt.

This story could happen today, next month or the following year, next door of you or at any other location or country. So you will get nothing NEW out of that movie but the sad reality of daily life in the eyes of children whose parents can't behave.

I only can highly recommend this movie - buy the DVD and you will enjoy it definitively more than just one time.

The is a very typically French slice of late Fifties middle-class life as seen during summer at the seaside when the parents' marriage is breaking up. The looks, the behavior, the attitudes could only be French. In that sense the film has a certain fascination and, hopefully, period accuracy (it's set in 1958).

The subtext is that for a young teenage girl in a sociable world, with a sister and brothers and a pleasant uncle and aunt and an annoying nanny and a young boy interested in kissing her and a close relationship with the imaginary addressee of her daily diary, her parents' disintegrating marriage is by no means the only thing going on in her world--especially given the fact that she's at a summer resort in a rented house and the mother is often away and the father is almost always away. There is a lot going on, most notably the changes in herself. This is probably the film's and Kurys' real subject--only it's a difficult one to put across and she doesn't quite succeed. Ultimtely too much is nonetheless going on, and it is all given too similar weight. Kurys, perhaps in her effort to balance autobiography with history and sociology, winds up making neither the adult nor the children's point of view strong enough. Lindon, Bruni-Tedeschi, Bacri, Berry, and Baye have been in better films. However, they're interesting actors, and the child actors are equally fine. This is not as bad or as great as some have suggested. It's very watchable, but it doesn't really go anywhere.Not a disaster, and a sincere effort, but not successful storytelling and not finally a very memorable experience.

This was the fifth of the nine films Diane Kurys has so far directed and the third of three (Diabolo Menthe, Coup de Foudre being the others) that deal with her own experiences in childhood and adolescence. In the second film, Coup de Foudre, the character based on Kury's own mother and fictionalised as Lena was played by Isabelle Huppert whilst here Nathalie Baye assumes the role opposite Richard Berry as husband/father Michel. The action has moved on from the war and post-war years in Lyon (Kury's own home town) to the late 1950s when thirteen year old Frederique (Julie Bataille),the closest character to the young Kurys herself and her eight year old sister Sophie are taken by their Nanny Odette (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) to the seaside for the summer vacation. A pre-credit sequence reveals to us the gulf (explored first in Coup de Foudre) that now exists between the parents and which the sisters are perhaps subconsciously aware. At the last minute - literally at the railway station itself - they realize that Lena will not accompany them. Once established at the resort they take out their frustration on Odette as a ploy to force their mother to join them but when she does so she spends more time with a lover Claude (Vincent Lindon) than with them. Also on hand are Leon (Jean-Pierre Bacri and the highly fertile Bella (Zabou) and when Michel shows up he deliberately destroys the car that symbolised Lena's independence and engages in a verbal and physical quarrel with Lena that is so intense that Frederique threatens to kill herself with a shard of glass broken during their fighting. This is an outstanding film in which the pain of adolescence is once-removed through the filter of nostalgia and replete with the tiny 'touches' - popular songs of the day, etc - that we use as signposts to lead us back into the past. Fifteen years on it's fascinating to see the younger versions of six exceptional French actors two of whom (Zabou with Se Souvenirs des belles chooses, and Bruni-Tedeschi with Il est plus facile pour un chameau ...) would go on to direct outstanding films themselves. I can't recommend this one highly enough.