Moray Nairn
Heleen is 14 years old. She has a brother. Her parents split up and each embark on unwise liaisons which fail to make them happy. Sadly, that's about it. The film takes 90 ponderous minutes to tell this story, from Heleen's viewpoint.Ostensibly, this is supposed to be about the girl's sexual awakening, but, really, there is so little growth in any of the characters that we can hardly call it a coming-of-age story. More like a creeping along of age story. It has many familiar elements - girl finds holiday romance with dusky European with beautiful eyes - in this case, brooding Bernard, the French boy, who, inevitably, tries to grope her behind the bike sheds in the campsite (literally) and is consigned to summer oblivion. Girl also finds bad boy Steve fascinating in his brooding intense (drug fuelled) solitude. Think of a Nietche-spouting James Dean for the 1970s but looking more like Ronan Keating.Then there is the horny friend / come boyfriend, Axel, (complete with stereotypical pimples) who just wants to get his end away with virginal schoolchum Heleen, and therefore is content to accept the advance planning of a New YEar's party in order to achieve his own Nirvana.The end of the movie is a mess. The New Year's party starts to look interesting with a group of decidedly non-conforming punk teens inhabiting the father's former office building (he has been relocated to Maastricht - Freud, get your talons into THAT one.....father figure transmogrifies into hedonist orgy etc etc). However, Steve zones out after one injection too many, Heleen doesn't get the sexual fireworks from pimply boyfriend Axel or bad-boy Steve and has to make do with the traditional gunpowder variety. Then, inexplicably, they go home and have sex anyway on the sofa. The lesson? I'm not sure there is one, except maybe that sex is inevitable as a teenager, and that parents let you down eventually.At times, vaguely reminiscent of Catherine Breillat's themes but only as a poor parody, this movie is full of arty hand-held camera shots that fail to illuminate any important angle of this familiar storyline, and instead leave us pondering why the director appears to have chosen to frame the characters' neck jewellery as a recurring motif. There is a Chinese proverb: "Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect." That's probably about as close as you will get.
