Passe ton bac d'abord

Best known in Britain for La Gueule Ouverte and Loulou, Pialat is a major, though unfortunately marginalised, French talent whose realist eye here lights on provincial teenage life, producing something like a cross between Ken Loach and a Gallic Gregory's Girl. The non-professional kids, on communal holiday from the title's exhortation to concentrate on their school exams, show a lively disregard for any notion of adolescent angst, despite dead-end prospects, while Pialat never indulges the exploitative clichés of the native genre of 'nostalgic' teen-sex low comedy.