Sharon Lockhart Selects: My Little Loves

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, 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 about both sex and class, and about the relation between the two.