COLD WATER (86)

Directed by: Olivier Assayas (1994)

Starring: Virginie Ledoyen, Cyprien Fouquet, Laszlo Szabo

The Pitch: Two troubled teens - an alienated boy doing badly at school, a rebellious girl in and out of sanatoria - struggle through Life in mid-70s provincial France.

Theo Sez: Something like a masterpiece, though you wouldn't think so if you happened to leave in the middle : the first half is naturalistic teen-angst observation of a high (if not particularly thrilling) order - then, with a magical bridging sequence in a misty forest glade, it suddenly erupts into the famous "party scene", an extended set-piece of astonishing range and intensity, before subsiding (in what seems initially redundant, but is actually a masterstroke) back into "reality" only different now, rural rather than urban, more subdued and desolate. You might call it a complete picture of adolescence - the feelings of dead-endness and oppression, the first liberating epiphany, then finally the beginnings of maturity and the realisation that things will be calmer from now on but also sadder, more assured and settled, less redeemed by possibilities. Just the observation in the more conventional early scenes would be enough to recommend it - things like the father-son discussion about the boy's future, with our hero staving off despair by concentrating all his attention on walking along the edges of a rug on the floor - as would the intricate mastery of the party scene (where the camera seems to move at random, yet keeps picking up the person with the next bit of business) ; but what's really great is the mixture of moods, film-making at its most agile and protean. It combines - less organically than in IRMA VEP, but no less excitingly - the adventurous, what-the-hell qualities of the Nouvelle Vague with an undercurrent of sombre, lyrical fatalism ; I may well be wrong, but I can't think of anything as fleet-footed and plastic-poetic since the early-30s heyday of Clair and Renoir.