Relaxed humor couches the pain in this engaging drama of black teenagers in Montreal; the limbo of being young, black, and English speaking in the Quebec capital plays and weighs heavily on their lives. But the film's off-the-cuff naturalism reveals a kind of stoic courage of everyday life that is the more convincing for fine performances by non-professional actors playing roles very close to their own experiences. Pat (Pat Dillon) is the deceptively doe-eyed heroine whose feistiness is only momentarily daunted by the discovery that she is pregnant at age 18. From the cramped flat she shares with Sylvie and Debbie, both teenage mothers themselves, she attempts to infuse her boyfriend Fabian (Fabian Gibbs) with a sense of fatherly responsibility. The latter, a high-school dropout, gives it his best shot, but he is in the grip of self-destructiveness, born of boredom and uselessness and fed by unrealistic dreams. Their romance is decidedly unsentimental as befits a film that dissects, through a woman's eyes, relations between the sexes as inherited by yet another generation of blacks. Lines like "If you can take care of my baby, you can take care of me," spoken by an errant mate, reverberate with endless irony.