Should He or Shouldn't He?

HAVE YOU EVER stumbled into a brief, embarrassing relationship which, compressed into one image and seen from the make point of view, unfolded something like this:

"She shut the door to the room quickly behind her and then, as she receded playfully backward, motioned 'Come hither' with her finger until, seeing she could retreat no further, I closed my eyes delightedly and was just about to move beyond games with a kiss when she smilingly stuck her thumb in her mouth and giggled?"

Such is the maneuver Veronique innocently pulls on her godfather in this movie, and also the effect the film, in turn, has on us. Veronique wafts the smell of lust, bankruptcy, illegitimate births, etc., by our noses, but does not allow us into the bakery. The film means us, you see, to perceive the "world of adults" as 13-year-old Veronique Prevost perceives it--with our noses pressed bemusedly against the window. For she, supposedly, is at just that stage of life (probably non-existent, but let's pretend) when she can catch all of life's cruel ironies with an innocent eye and still not let them overwhelm her.

Veronique observes everything, though--"I'm observing you," she tells her godparents as they set out for a summer vacation; she, on loan from her parents; they, on the lam from modernity. Veronique also keeps a diary. (You visualize the schema: 11-year-old girls draw horses, 12-year-old girls draw fashion models, 13-year-old girls keep diaries. Everybody knows that. In her family living room we have been spying her, every evening after supper, ostensibly unravelling math problems for school, but in reality, of course, documenting the sordid details of her mother's scary sleep-walking, her father's hunger for inheritance, plus all the humorless nagging and nit-picking French bourgeois coupling. (Not for spite or for blackmail, but she confesses--addressing the camera like a fellow detached spectator--merely for her own amusement.)

HER GRANDMOTHER dies one morning, however, the film saying it happens while Veronique is checking her face for zits. And so, instead of spending her usual summer at that woman's home, she trots off with her godparents on a car trip. Through the not ever steamy window of her curiosity we soon see that this couple's existence is no bed of French lillies, either. 'Grown up for Ann, the late thirtiesh godmother, translates into dyed hair, bulging thighs, chain-smoking, an abandoned child in the distant past and a psychological block against bearing another one ever since. 'Gaining status and respectability' for the godfather, Jean, means becoming so broad-boned and stern-faced, so outwardly tailored to a style of bureaucratic modishness, that when he tries to behave like a kid again he comes off looking like a fool.

Jean proceeds to klutz his way through a halfdozen "should I or shouldn't I?" impasses with the pubescent Veronique. The poor guy obviously has a right to feel lonely; when he crudely but movingly divulges to Ann his haunting memories of first seeing his mother naked, she doesn't even lift the pen from her shopping list. But the actor, Michel Peyrelon, possesses the kind of jowly, hugemouthed face that turns even a wounded smile into a leer, and when he finally holds Veronique's passive head on his shoulder, patting her hair and closing his eyes, his emotional wince seems to say stupidly "God, I'm sensitive, God, I'm sensitive." (If you've ever seen Anthony Newley sing "What Kind of Fool Am I"...)

So what does the modern man do when unable to gratify himself through children or his over-urbanized wife or even a paid vacation from an uncreative job? He masturbates. Which, when Veronique hunts for him at the beach one day, she finds him doing...

Veronique, unfortunately, takes this all in stride, as does Claudine Guilmain's directorial tyle. This brings to mind Vincent Canby's interesting remark about this film: [Guilmain], I suspect, made exactly the kind of film she set out to." I'm not so sure Canby communicates exactly what he set out to, but he would probably agree that Guilmain's straightforward and naive realization of a 13 year-old's perspective does produce some very funny moments--a ridiculous dispute in the car, Jean flopping off-balance into a garden chair--without stooping to too much cynicism. But also without touching us very deeply, because Veronique never does act her real age, never even suggests that her pre-mature coolness is really a hold-out against advancing adolescent self-consciousness (a la Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, for instance, or McKenzie Phillips in American Graffiti.)

As it stands the film leaves us as it leaves unruffable Veronique at summer's end, vaguely amused, hardly flustered, and ready to forget and move back to the grind.