L'Hôtel de la Plage

Michel Lang's dated (arrested?) preoccupation with the supposed comic dimensions of adolescent skirt-chasing -already displayed in A Nous les Petites Anglaises! - re-emerges intact in this omnibus version of every dire French holiday-romance movie you've ever seen. Ticking off the predictable, prudishly 'permissive' permutations of a dozen or so stereotyped holidaymakers lends the film about as much narrative tension as filling in last week's football coupon. Lang alternately indulges and exploits the intended objects of his satire, and for the genuine toughness of a generically related film like The Lacemaker, merely substitutes a cloying sentimentality.