Christine and Gilles (Virginie Ledoyen and Cyprien Fouquet) are rebellious teenagers in love in a void-suburban Paris. Gilles's domineering father (Laszlo Szabo) tries to protect him from adulthood, while Christine's divorced parents can't support her in any sense of the word. When she is arrested for shoplifting, her father has her institutionalized. "An economically plotted, lyrical take on the doomed-and-misunderstood-teens-in-love story. The film's unforgettable centerpiece is an apocalyptic all-night party at an abandoned country house that definitively captures the anarchic, half-mad rapture of youth by way of music by Leonard Cohen, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, Dylan, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Shot with a raw, loose naturalism, Cold Water is by turns mournful and exhilarating, tender and harsh in its demonstration of how the stakes and ultimate consequences of teenage turmoil differ when it originates not just in adolescent rebellion but in psychic necessity." (Gavin Smith) Cold Water was fourth in Film Comment's recent critics poll, "Top 30 Unreleased Foreign Language Films of the Nineties."