Daniel (Martin Loeb) lives a very pleasant life. He grows up in the French countryside, under the care of his loving grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne), where he spends his day engaging in beautifully reckless childhood activities with his coterie of friends. He is a young man who enjoys the simple pleasures in life because that is precisely what he was raised to appreciate. However, the return of his neglectful mother (Ingrid Caven) signals a new chapter in the life of the young man, as he is to move to the city with his mother and her mysterious boyfriend. Upon arrival, Daniel starts to change – not seeing any point in sending him to school, his mother suggests he gets work experience, and organizes him a job as an apprentice mechanic. For the most part, he is left to his own devices, and when not being exploited as forced labour, he is rambling around the city, mingling with various enigmatic and shady characters who begin to prove to be negative influences on the young man, including teaching him their ways of hormone-induced misogyny and troubling debauchery. Caught at a crossroads, Daniel is forced to come to terms with his new position in life, conflicted between his carefree past in the countryside and the new, often intimidating future in the city.

Jean Eustache occupies a strange position in the history of cinema – much like the protagonist in My Little Loves (French: Mes Petites Amoureuses), he never quite fit into one particular category and was always something of an outsider. Occurring in between the apex of the French New Wave and the period European cinema defined by meta-commentary that came after it, Eustache seemed to embody the ideals of many of his artistic peers, as well as a burgeoning sense of self-awareness that was missing in the work of the more noteworthy auteurs from that time. I will be the first to admit that My Little Loves is not a film I entirely loved – in fact, despite an astoundingly great first act, the film as a whole was somewhat disappointing and didn’t seem to be able to conceivably choose a particular narrative avenue on which to traverse. This is a film that means more than it is actually willing to demonstrate, and it certainly isn’t a bad work by any means. Rather, it is one that finds itself occupying a more ambigious space between genres, conventions and even filmmaking movements, often approaching some sense of embodying all of their best qualities, but consistently stopping short of being entirely brilliant. Eustache, having only made two feature-length films in his tragically short career, definitely had many great ideas (and when we get to The Mother and the Whore in the coming weeks, we’ll discuss how this film shows the director embodying his very unique position between movements), as demonstrated in some of his short films. The problem comes in the fact that when presented with something with a bit more space to express his vision, he struggles to realize his vision nearly as well as he could have.

The character of Daniel is one that really needs to be dissected, because in spite of all the flaws in My Little Loves – which shouldn’t even be called flaws, because they aren’t necessarily negative, but rather just very different from what they could’ve amounted to – it isn’t that there are problems in this film, but a series of great ideas that are never given any significant engagement through Eustache’s very strange tendency to balance far too much than he should feasibly be able to handle – he is an extremely interesting character. A reading of the character could suggest that he was created as a response to the French New Wave archetypes that Eustache was somewhat rebelling against. Daniel seems to be an amalgamation of the extremely trendy but existential angst-ridden city slickers of Jean-Luc Godard, and the more innocent childhood characters of François Truffaut, specifically the recurring protagonist Antoine Doinel, who could feasibly be considered an inspiration for this character and his journey towards maturity. Where the film falls apart is that Eustache doesn’t seem to care nearly enough about the character more than he does what the character actually represents – so many artists over time have delved deeply in these coming-of-age stories and attempted to show the corruption of childhood innocence by outside forces, and they do it so much better than Eustache, who does push the boundaries of portraying childhood in a way that deserves some credit for how unique it is. The problem is, in the endeavour to be original, the character loses all semblance of plausibility, rather being a mismatched combination of ideas, rather than a fully-formed, functional and most importantly, interesting, character.

To his credit, Martin Loeb is terrific in My Little Loves. This is by no means an easy role to play – not only is he placed in the central role, which requires him to be in every frame of the film, often sharing the screen with performers who only have a handful of scenes, carrying the film almost entirely on his own. It is not an enviable role, and for the most part, Loeb handles it well, with his performance being remarkable, considering his young age and the vast amount of material he had to grapple with. His work in My Little Loves is often a lot more concise and interesting than what is occurring around it – it almost feels as if he deserved to be in a somewhat better film, because his conviction and dedication to the role, while certainly far from perfect, is one of the sole unimpeachable highlights of the film. His performance is really quite exceptional – he finds the humanity in a character that ultimately serves the purpose of representing the loss of childhood innocence, without being a figure of complete moral corruption – had Eustache employed a more cynical archetype, this character would have been far less compelling, and would’ve put Loeb’s extraordinary talents, which rely very much on his quiet expressivity and his ability to convey the most intricate of emotions through the most subtle glance, at an enormous disadvantage. The work Loeb does here is a lot better than it should’ve been, and even when it is very clear that he is hopelessly out of his depth (especially considering the role calls for him to engage in some light debauchery, such as smoking and misogyny), he manages to overcome the jarring discomfort in his portrayal of a young man really trying to make his way through a world he doesn’t quite understand.

Yet, below the somewhat lacklustre execution, there is quite a promising central theme in My Little Loves, whereby we are given a protagonist who is essentially the product of his surroundings – throughout the film, Daniel seems to be entirely inspired by those around him, often using them as examples on how to live his life – one of the most touching moments in the film comes towards the beginning, where his grandmother takes him to the circus, where he observes a stuntman doing a particularly simple but effective trick, which Daniel himself replicates for his friends in the following scene. This is the main concept that governs My Little Loves, as the entire film takes the approach of watching the protagonist navigate through the world by replicating it, proving that he is very much guided and nurtured by his surroundings. This is both a merit and a shortcoming, as while it does create interesting conflict between the ideas of the rural and the urban (not only in regards to the actual physical locations but also the attitudes and behaviours embedded within them), it does prove to be unfortunate when it comes to characterizing Daniel, who is a very weak character due to the fact that Eustache doesn’t give him a voice of his own – simply existing as someone entirely influenced by those around him means that he doesn’t develop any sense of being his own person. It is never a good idea to construct a work with a character solely as a social tabula rasa, especially not when you’re trying to make a compelling coming-of-age drama. We can’t ever really connect with Daniel because Eustache doesn’t give him any particularly special qualities, which is not only unfair to the character, but to the film itself.

Ultimately, there aren’t too many merits to My Little Loves, but it does do certain things quite well. Perhaps the biggest merit of this film is that it is a simple story that takes a slice-of-life approach to representing the disparity between the rural and the urban. It appears to also be somewhat autobiographical, with the era in which it takes place being very likely influenced by the director’s own childhood. Featuring a main character in conflict between the traditions of his countryside upbringing, and the excitement of his new exploits in the big city, My Little Loves is mainly just a series of vignettes that may not always be as cohesive as they should be, but do manage to paint a wonderfully charming portrait of youth and the reckless abandon we all experience in our younger years. There is a great deal more than Eustache could’ve done with this story, and it sometimes feels as if he didn’t develop it in quite the way it should, with a lack of motivation in some of the characters, in particular the peripheral supporting roles, meaning the burden is placed mostly on the young actor in the leading role, who admirably manages to handle it just enough to not become unbelievable. My Little Loves is a film that had a promising concept and a great overarching story based on its multitudes of interesting themes, which makes the fact that it is so hopelessly middling such an extreme disappointment, because it had all the makings of a great film, and it really should have been a lot better than it ended up being.