It all starts at his grandmother’s country home in Pessac. Waking up to the usual soup and bread made ready before school, dressed in a cardigan and shirt only a grandparent could provide, followed with the warmth of her embrace before he peddles away. It’s simple routinely life here for young Daniel, a life he’s grown into to up until now. But two thoughts strike him in the outside world. He recalls striking the strongest boy in his class without reason or retaliation. And at a communion, he describes the pulse his erection feels against the girl in front. It’s no secret young Daniel is growing up fast, with the small wonders of life beginning to blossom.
The film’s title may allude to the childhood sweethearts of our past, but director Jean Eustache captures youth with little regard for the sentimental. Filmed like a series of vignettes, My Little Loves shows us those precocious years where love is what the older boys brag about, rather than a playful first kiss in the playground. With Daniel taken away by his mother for the city of Narbonne, his childish understandings of life are also driven away in favour of manhood. Smoking straights, working the repair shop over school, and learning the ritual of picking up girls become routine over the frolicking and circus found back in the home country.
This contrast of familiarity is what lends Eustache to peer into the loss of Daniel’s innocence. A key moment of this can be found in meeting of a Spanish man the mother has never mentioned to him before. His naive instinct is to hug the man with open grace, but he’s offered a stern handshake instead. It’s a realisation both he and the mother lay witness to, which Daniel sums up in cold Bressonian clarity: “I was sure I saw disappointment in her eyes.” Despite the actors seemingly acting on Bresson’s technique of “models”, it would be remiss to make further connections between the two. There’s nothing here that quite reaches the pessimistic misery of a Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967). Rather the film seeks truths in the fleeting summer Daniel will look back and study for years to come. A problematic honesty that Eustache is unafraid to leer into, resulting in observant filmmaking.
Cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who captured Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series, is no stranger to studying lustful men in their temptation to women. Here his camera meets the eye level of Daniel as a child of burgeoning curiosity, whether it’s paired with the older Don Juans at the café or learning the game of make-out at the old cinema. Shots of hands edging towards each other emphasise the universal language of touch, whilst Daniel’s gazing eyes display him at the early crossroads of yearning. At the tail-end of the film, Almendros’ photography matches his scenic beauty in La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, 1967), with the boy’s bike ride to Sainte-Marie finding luscious imagery in the tall-grass and river streams. It all helps to present the film’s finest image of colour, that summer haze of being lost in the fields, relishing the temporary love that only can Daniel speak of.
For those wanting a more daring, candid coming-age film with stellar cinematography, look no further than Jean Eustache’s masterful and under-appreciated work.
My Little Loves shows throughout July as part of The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache 4K retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, in New York.
