Critics reviews

The final sequences find Daniel back home in Pessac, on vacation. His old friends are still kids, while Daniel has aged irrevocably into adolescence. This is a loss that cannot be recovered, and Eustache renders it with eloquent, bone-deep sadness.

Compassionate but never sentimental, My Little Loves is an essential entry in the coming-of-age canon, a film that ennobles adolescence by so truthfully portraying its attendant indignities.

Jean Eustache's second feature, from 1974, is a remarkable feat of imaginative reconstruction... In Eustache's loamy, holistic vision, the events are shaped less by the demands of drama than by the meanderings of consciousness itself.

What ultimately disappoints is the utter familiarity of the material, which Eustache's control is able to camouflage or minimize in places but not really transform. And what remains perplexing is that, with so many important and fascinating works in the contemporary French cinema still unavailable in this country — by Garrel, Marc'O, Moullet, Pialat, Pollet, Rivette and Rozier, among others — we should be offered such relatively listless and unexciting material in their place.