Pretty Good

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Beautifully photographed, lovely young women, virtually no plot or plot motivations. I guess this is a genre of French cinema. Three young women take a boat out on the sea at night. They are lucky to survive when the boat gets wrecked. One of them lies unconscious on the beach and is rescued by a handsome boy. Soon they are sort of owning the island and having various encounters with some young men they have met. All three, plus a beautiful concert pianist, are hard to take your eyes off of. But at some point it slogs along to where there are no real questions. I watched it because the Criterion Collection included it and I have been picking an choosing from their library of films. This one really turned out to be a waste of time. Lots of standing around, posing, and laughing, and doing little else.

This film makes you really appreciate the invention of the fast forward button on your remote control. It's exquisite boredom in beautiful pictures. For once Hamilton goes relatively easy on soft focus shots. However, what I found hard to take about the film was that although Anja Schüte was about 19 when it was shot the girls are portrayed as much younger than they actually are. This whole Lolita thing especially as there is an older man involved leaves me rather uneasy. The heroine is actually shaved in the pubic area in order to make her look even younger than she is. Come on, sex is a nice past time- between consenting adults. Another thing I found odd was that neither Beart nor Schüte have a nude scene in the film, well, not a proper one at least.

One star for the "plot". One star for the acting. One star for the dubbing into squeaky-voiced American. Five stars for Monica Broeke and Inge Maria Granzow, with their propensity for taking all their clothes off. And ten out of ten for the divine Emmanuelle Béart, two years before she made 'Manon des sources'. Béart also undresses a couple of times, but even fully-clothed her presence is enough to make this film eminently watchable. Watch out for the scene where she tells her friend about the three "first times" for a girl. It's corny, but still far more erotic than the rather laughably choreographed "love scenes" featuring Broeke, Granzow and Patrick Bauchau. Incidentally, the cinematography is not great; the stills for the closing credits are a better indication of what David Hamilton is capable of.

This is typical Hamilton. Gorgeous teenage girls and dreamy photography. I must disagree with one of the comments from another poster saying there is no nudity in the film. He must have seen a cut version. I have to say I don't think the plot or the acting are the strong points of Hamiltons movies. It does feel sometimes like a voyeuristic excuse to present beautiful young women in varying degrees of nudity. This may be quite transgressive of western (specially American) taboos, which equate nudity to porn. Overall a quite unique film. Try to get the uncut version because, quite frankly, the whole point of Hamiltons focus is the female body, (he is mainly a photographer after all)