Eustache takes up the great European tradition of the coming-of-age film and quietly dismantles its emotional conventions. My Little Loves is autobiographical but impartial, empathetic but not sympathetic, sentimental only in the Flaubert sense of sentimental education. For Eustache's twelve-year-old alter ego Daniel (Martin Loeb), puberty is a process of learning by observation and imitation. In a series of episodes that unfold in a muted, Bressonian rhythm, he learns how to perform, how to work, how to enact comically solemn sexual rituals. The overarching lesson is disillusionment, not just about sex but about class, and about the relation between the two. While many of Eustache's films are famously logorrheic, here the emphasis is on gaze, gesture, and setting. Nestor Almendros's cinematography calmly captures the beauty and shabbiness of Pessac and Narbonne, where Eustache puts in an appearance on a park bench, watching his younger self watching.
—Juliet Clark