The Perils of Puberty

The Adolescents is a three-part Franco-Italian film in which puberty proves as difficult for the moviemakers as it is for the girls involved in the film's pallid episodes. In Fiammetta, a Florentine figlia who lives with her widowed mother gazes dreamily at the family's carefully manicured estate, brooding about the disorder within herself. "The warmth in me is so soft that it hurts," she mutters, in a plotless sequence as muzzy as her mood. Marie-France and Veronica tells of two chic Parisiennes, not yet 17, sophisticated but full of curiosity about the homme-dingers hanging around them. While Marie-France reads Baudelaire, Veronica lives him, at an endless round of wild parties. Her destiny, she sighs, is a marriage of convenience when she is "25 and old."

Although all three episodes pretend to be offering a mature view of a difficult time of life, only the central one, Genevieve, avoids being kid stuff. In it, two French Canadian girls travel to the winter carnival in Montreal. On the way Louise (Louise Marleau) shows some photographs of a young man to her friend Genevieve. His first name, she says, is Bernard; his last name is "hands off." But Genevieve can't keep her hands to herself, and eventually she loses a girl friend by stealing a boy friend. As the junior vamp, Canada's Genevieve Bujold also walks off with the show. Featured in Alain Resnais' La Guerre Est Finie (TIME, Feb. 3), Bujold at 24 displays a confident talent and a pert, dark beauty that suggests the imminent emergence of a star.

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