In 1971 Jean Eustache wrote two semi-autobiographical screenplays, Mes Petites Amoureuses (My Little Loves) and La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore). In reverse order he directed The Mother and the Whore first and in late 1974 followed it with My Little Loves. My Little Loves is set in the sunfilled moodiness of Southwestern France (near Eustache's Pessac birthplace) circa 1950. It is the quiet coming-of-age tale of a young boy, a theme that has been treated many times in French cinema but rarely with such detached grace and subtle emphasis on the more stoical side of adolescence. Eustache evokes a Bressonian performance from young Martin Loeb as Daniel, a thirteen-year-old who moves from his happy village childhood, living with his grandmother, to a small-town adolescence living with his mother and her Spanish lover. Finances force him to quit school, leaving him plenty of time for idle exploration of the street life of the town-the backstreets, the cinemas, and the company of other mischievous boys. Daniel's tentative approaches to the female sex-from practical jokes to actual kisses-form a kind of chronology for the film. But this is no nostalgic look at sexual awakening; though the film is not without humor, Daniel's exploits are passionless, his confusion, realistically, masked in the suppression of emotion. "Under its beguiling familiar surface," wrote Geoff Brown in Sight & Sound, "Mes Petites Amoureuses remains as stern and uncompromising as its predecessor (The Mother and the Whore)."