I don't know why --- maybe it was Suzanne's unflattering hairstyle or the clumsy efforts of the young people to behave with sophistication and independence while they were laughably inexperienced and dependent...but I almost felt as if I knew them or had been there. Though I'm American, I am the same age as these "kids" and was in college at the same time. Somehow the little games and the infighting; the competition and rather comical efforts to figure others out evoked some of my own college experiences in evanescent crowds of friends. I attended Berkeley in the late sixties and early seventies; what with roommates and friends of friends, you ended up knowing quite a circle of people; you kept running into them around town, in coffee shops and study areas. Various personalities emerged.... Gillaume was certainly a familiar type; I could see him ending up an attorney somehow. I actually liked Suzanne: life was not easy for a rather homely girl trying to claim her share of romance; to be loved and valued among these predatory and immature young men.I grew up to be a writer; the kids I knew in college and their various relationships and outcomes --- some of them tragic --- have provided me with endless material. This movie takes a risk in being primitive and loosely, almost carelessly constructed, but it captures a time and set of people in all their lumpy reality. I think the risk was justified, but I can see where others would not. I spent time one summer in Paris when I was in college, living high up in a little hotel room from which I could see Notre Dame, staying drunk on Sangria and partying till 6 a.m. on the Rive Gauche, recovering at the sidewalk cafes on the Boul San Mich.....meeting Sorbonne students and inflicting our respective broken French and English on one another, aided by drawings on napkins. Lots of superficial envy and competitiveness as we paired off in transitory love affairs which dissolved after a couple of days. We all felt very special, that postwar generation; we were very "brilliant" and irreverent --- and constantly broke. We spent hours analyzing our parents, discussing love and disillusionment, struck poses, were frightfully insecure. It was fun, though; we were all different nationalities too; in addition to French and Americans, there were British, Moroccan, Yugoslav, Dutch....and so on. It was a lot of fun; this movie brought some of that experience back.

Never heard of Eric Rohmer? Me neither. Why? Watch one of these things and it'll be apparent. To tell you the truth, these movies, well at least the ones I've seen so far, remind me a lot of Ray Dennis Steckler's stuff (ergo the title of the review). But no one's out there calling Cash Flagg a genius, and his movies are ten times more watchable than this garbage. At least Steckler could hold the camera still while filming. Terrible.