SnoopyStyle Fifteen year old Pauline is spending her summer vacation at the coast with her older cousin Marion. Marion is sexy and getting a divorce. They run into Marion's old friend surfer Pierre who introduces them to divorced father Henri. Pierre is desperate to get together with Marion but she rejects him for Henri. Pauline and young surfer Sylvain get together.Amanda Langlet who plays Pauline actually looks to be 15. She's walking around in a skimpy bikini and trying to understand the stumbling sexual connections of the adults. There is one scene where Pierre gropes sleeping Pauline that plays more and more disturbing. My biggest problem is the static staging where the characters are frozen discussing whatever. It needs more movement in various scenes. Langlet has a steady presence although it would be great to have more explosive energy. The adults are lost which is disconcerning and Pauline is more adult than them.

Claudio Carvalho In the end of the summer vacation, the fifteen year old Pauline (Amanda Langlet) travel with her older divorced cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle) to her seaside house in Granville. While on the beach, Marion meets her old friend Pierre (Pascal Greggory), who has a crush on her, and his new acquaintance Henri (Féodor Atkine), who lives in Oceania and is spending vacation with his young daughter in the resort. In the night, they go to a casino and Marion has one night stand with Henri, feeling a great passion for him. However, Henri is a wolf and has no interest in having any commitment with Marion. Meanwhile Pauline listens and observes the behavior of the older people while she has a little but disappointing romance with a boy of her own age.A friend of mine is a great fan of Eric Rohmer and this is the first movie of this director that I watch; however I am disappointed with "Pauline à la Plage", maybe because of my greatest expectations with his work. This low budget movie has a simple, silly and shallow story; reasonable acting and empty lines; common screenplay without any originality and very poor camera and cinematography. I have not found anything special in this flick, and even the body of Arielle Dombasle is beautiful but not sexy. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Pauline na Praia" ("Pauline at the Beach")

Gerry-12 Pauline just manages to keep her place in the center of this film, and how nice that is. Her indecisive cousin, a Rohmer type, almost takes over the film with a great figure. The two men are as unreliable as Rohmer's men always are. Pauline, though, is just the acute teen age observer that one can really love. Her boyfriend shows a lot of rectitude too.This film is a kind of testament to whatever it is in teenagers that makes most of them survive fairly intact, incredible though that survival may be in retrospect. A sweet Rohmer film, and my favorite.A cute touch is Pauline's two bathing suits - the one that is barely there shows the gawky but unselfconscious teen ager she is, and the modest one suggests the sexy woman she will soon decide to be.Rohmer's work, even more than most good directors, is a series of essays on a single theme. This one gives more hope that women and men may be able to live together than most of the others do. Still I think Rohmer remains puzzled about how the sexes coexist.

stryker-5 The summer is dying as Marion and her young cousin Pauline arrive at a Normandy coastal resort for a short vacation. They meet up with Pierre, an old friend, and Henri, an older man with whom Marion becomes involved.A charming little essay on love and desire, this film could be called slow and slight - no matter, it follows its own internal purpose. These unexceptional people talk, lie, argue and make love in a natural and convincing way.Pauline (Amanda Langlet) is a witty 15-year-old who blossoms in the course of the story. We first see her wearing a sailor suit, looking child-like and presexual. She watches the antics of the adults with detached contempt, then meets Sylvain (Simon de la Brosse), a teenage beach bum with whom she becomes intimate. Pauline rises above the jealousies and posturings of the grown-ups and in a subtle way becomes the dominant figure in this ramshackle little group of vacationers.Rohmer wrote and directed this little comedy of love, and his chief satirical target is Marion (Arielle Dombasle). On the rebound from a foolish marriage, Marion enjoys posing as the worldly-wise older cousin, and she patronises Pauline abominably. It does not take long for Marion to betray herself as a phoney who talks in grandiloquent terms of love and the inner self, but who plays petty courtship games in a social circle of no consequence. "Je veux bruler d'amour", says this pompous prick teaser.It is clear as soon as Marion meets Henri (Feodor Atkine) that she has the hots for him. Her former amour Pierre (Pascal Greggory) is ever after playing catch-up as the mating-dance between Marion and Henri intensifies.The fulcrum of the film is the frolic in the sea involving the free-spirited Henri and the sweet-seller Rosette, who are joined by Sylvain. The latter is at a loose end because Marion and Pauline have gone on a day trip to Mont St-Michel, so he splashes in the sea with the older couple. To avert Marion's jealousy, Henri says that it was Sylvain who was trying to bed Rosette, not he - which leads to a major squabble.Plot is unimportant in this delicate reflection on love and sexual desire. The film is an attractive ensemble piece whose characters linger in the mind long after action movies have been forgotten. Extensive passages of dialogue, endless ruminations on personal relationships and nuances of behaviour are the fabric of this edifice.Verdict - very intelligent, very pretentious, very flirtatious, very longwinded, yet very appealing. Very French.