Pauline is 15 and she is spending her summer vacation in Granville with her older, sexually precocious cousin Marion. All Pauline has on her mind is spending time at the beach and if there are boys there, so much the better. To Pauline, they're nice but not indispensable, at least until she meets Sylvain ... and even then. Marion, on the other hand, likes to flirt, first with her ex-boyfriend Pierre and then with Henri, an older ethnologist who is something of a womanizer. The film, of course, is Eric Rohmer's PAULINE A LA PLAGE, one of his Comedies and Proverbs, and since we are in Rohmer-land there is a lot of talk, all of it interesting, all of it intelligent and a lot of sexual to-ing and fro-ing and many complications before matters resolve themselves and it ends just as it begins. Indeed this is one of the few Rohmer pictures in which people actually go to bed together rather than just talk about it. And, of course, it's funny in the way that great comedies should be funny, the gentle humour stemming from the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Indeed this, like so many other Rohmer pictures, is just about perfect and it's perfectly played by another of Rohmer's splendid ensembles, (Arielle Dombasle as Marion is another of Rohmer's great addle-headed heroines). A masterpiece.
Review of Pauline at the Beach
