First Effort

Romantic comedy of manners manqué, set in the post-Franco Swinging '70s and centred on a super-conventional Antoine Doinel clone and his encounters: with a sweet young thing and her swain; his waspish ex-spouse; one Belch, nihilist author of Dried Shit (subtle humour this isn't); Zoila, blue movie-maker who gets off on bestiality and ball-breaking fornication; and a bizarrely incongruous Ingmar Bergman, who luckily never appears. Well-liked in New York ('a new Woody Allen') and France ('neo-Truffaut'), this peevish and impatient portrait of Spain's late-blossoming flower generation has the generosity and incisiveness of neither.