My Little Loves
(Mes petites amoureuses)
Screening on Film
Directed by Jean Eustache.
France, 1975, 35mm, color, 123 min.
France, 1975, 35mm, color, 123 min.
Following the success of The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustache was finally able to make the equally personal but vastly different My Little Loves—a portrait of his childhood in the south of France in which every footstep, every gesture, and every visual detail seems drawn directly from the filmmaker’s memory. Young Martin Loeb plays Daniel, Eustache’s thirteen-year-old alter ego, and he figures in every scene of this exquisite chronicle of a “sentimental education.” Beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros, My Little Loves (the title is taken from a Rimbaud poem) reaches its emotional climax during an extended scene in which Daniel gets his first kiss in a movie theater showing Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.