Trop de Bonheur

An excellent feature, from a series in which various French directors treated a theme from their adolescence, set in a none-too-picturesque town in the Midi. It simply charts the shifts in relationships, over a day or so, between a bunch of kids around school-leaving age. Most of the last hour takes place at an impromptu drunken 'party', where the director's imaginative use of gesture, glances, dance and group composition to portray attraction and repulsion, lust and jealousy really comes into its own. Superbly evocative of teenage desire (with a few substantial asides on racial tension thrown in), this beautifully acted film takes an everyday situation and, thanks to acute observation, makes it both horribly familiar and totally compulsive.