I remember seeing this movie for the first time and about 15 more times over the years. When I was young it was a lot because of Vanessa's beauty and slightly because of the plot. Over the years the truth behind the story, the way the film unfolds, made me realize how emotional I get every time I see it. It's something all of us have gone through in one form or another. My heart went out to Mathilde and her feelings. Add to that the scenery and the atmosphere and you have the perfect tear bearer movie. Excellent acting and wise choice of actors make the movie very believable. You sympathize with all the characters and feel there emotions. A great movie for a rainy night.

It's been over a decade since I saw this film, but I do remember it rather fondly. It showed sensitivity for the characters as well as the subject matter, instead of being exploitative. At the same time, it was quite frank in dealing with the story and of course, it ends tragically. I also remember being impressed with Vanessa Paradis, both for playing a difficult role deftly, and for her physical beauty. It was only recently that I became aware of her real-life relationship (being Johnny Depp's girlfriend).

I would love to see the film again, but it seems it hasn't been widely circulated on DVD, and the R2 disc is hard to find. What a pity.

Bruno Cremer is a fiftyish philosophy teacher who tries to help his seventeen-year-old student, Vanessa Paradis, get her academic efforts in order. She shows up late for class, if at all, she's flunking math and other subjects. He gives a lecture on Freud and the unconscious and asks her to stay after class and explain why she's so slack. After all, maybe he can help her.

The subject of his lecture, the unconscious, was apt because Bruno's ego has no idea of what his id is leading him into. One wonders if he is familiar with the Electra complex. Paradis invites him to her flat where she casually undresses and changes clothes in front of him, to his embarrassment. I mean -- even in Loire there are limits.

Before you know it -- or before Cremer knows it, at any rate -- they're lovers. Hints of the affair become received wisdom although both desperately try to hide their love for one another. Certainly, Cremer's wife knows about it. As usual, both females can waltz intuitive rings around the somewhat oafish male.

Cremer's wife is fed up with the constant phone calls and the poison pen letter and finally leaves him for a while, telling him to think it over before she returns. He thinks it over between roles in the hay with Paradis and decides it wouldn't work between the professor and the student. Sensibly, he ends it, telling Paradis that in ten years he'll be an old man. Her passion, though, seems adamantine. She'll love him whether he's young or old, thin or fat, sick or healthy. They can run away together and she can pretend to be his DAUGHTER. And she seems to mean it, but Cremer is mature (or dull) enough to see that not all things are possible. So back comes the jealous wife.

It doesn't work out. Paradis continues to haunt him and taunt him. She nuzzles up to one new boyfriend after another in front of him. Her accomplices break the windows and paint filthy sayings on the bookstore his wife runs.

At his wit's end, Cremer yanks her out of his classroom, flings her into an empty room and slaps her around, but she keeps coming back to him like a lost puppy until finally he gives in, peels off her clothes, and -- well, a few minutes later, the whole school seems to be peering through the windows at them, with one student yelling, "Hey, a teacher is screwing a naked girl!" What happens next to the undone Cremer is instructive. In America, if a teacher gets caught in flagrante delectable with an underage student, he (or she) winds up in court and then in jail. In France, Cremer is given a reprimand by his school and sent to exile in Dunkirk, where he continues lecturing as before. After all, screwing a naked seventeen-year-old girl on a classroom desk may not be evidence of savoir vivre but, well, why stir things up? (Insert here a philosophical shrug, the kind found in such abundance in France.) The performances are adequate, probably no more than that. Paradis is quite a lynx-eyed morseau with two shiny front teeth behind those tiny pouting lips. Seventeen? She's about as tall as Cremer's lower sternum. She's so petite and gracile, she looks as if she'd barely made fifteen, at least until she sheds her clothes, something that, to my perverted taste anyway, she doesn't do quite often enough. Her figure is exquisite.

Bruno Cremer LOOKS like a philosophy professor, big, soft, flabby, and comfortable, with gentle blue eyes. His nose, though -- it looks as if, when God was handing out noses, he asked Cremer what he would like, and Cremer replied, "Two lumps, please." That proboscis has its identical twin on the face of George C. Scott.

The script isn't bad actually. It deals intelligently with what is basically a conundrum without a solution. Paradis is right. They should take what they can get while it's available. But so is Cremer. Loving CAN be folly. Ten years, heck. In twenty he'll be 70 and she'll be a vibrant and eager 37. What's she going to do -- wheel him around in his lap robe to exciting night clubs? Jean-Claude Brisseau's direction is functional without being in any way imaginative. Cremer's switch from avuncular prof to jealous swain takes place too quickly. The outburst is unexpected. And Brisseau's got a shot -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- of the two lovers, one young, one old, running through a hillside field of canary yellow poesies beside a lake. All that's missing is slow motion. Otherwise it would be a parody of its genre. (Classy, adult, colorfully photographed soap opera.)