enitharmon | Film Diary: Pauline à la plage (Eric Rohmer, 1982)

Those who don't get Eric Rohmer get very exercised about his preoccupation with teenage girls and charge him with a rather sordid paedophilia. They are missing the point. Rohmer is steeped in French culture, a culture much less obsessed with child-like adult women than the American one. His teenage heroines emerge as far more mature and in control than the grown-ups around them.

It's true that fourteen-year-old Pauline starts the film looking very childlike and ripe for exploitation beside her older, sophisticated cousin Marion. Yet she grows up before our eyes in the course of a late summer break at the seaside. While Marion throws herself into a whirl of flirtation and betrayal with her ex-lover and a cynical, predatory older man, Pauline finds an attachment with a boy of her own age and takes it responsibly. The question at the end is, who is really the mature and responsible one.