After two false starts and a large part of the budget spent, Pialat reworked the concept and the script for the third time, assembling a few professional teenage actors and filling in the rest of the cast with amateurs culled from Lens, the same province of Naked Childhood. While much of the wandering narrative was scripted as they shot—often from the teenagers’ actual conversations of the day before—at other times the actors would just be hanging out and not realize they were being filmed. Pass Your Exams First follows no single character or primary focus, as if, like its confused subjects teetering on the edge of maturity and responsibility, it is experimenting with various paths without knowing quite where any of them will lead. The most comic entry in Pialat’s oeuvre, the film follows the group’s antics in school, at home and on holiday, and at the only hot spot, the town’s actual café. With limited options at a time of shifting traditions and economies, they engage in fleeting couplings, contradictory opinions, vague dreams and their own false starts. Presciently inscribed by the hand of Pialat, their lives remain a series of question marks … awkwardly, ambivalently, precisely rendered question marks.