The Cinematheque

“Presciently inscribed by the hand of Pialat, [the characters’] lives remain a series of question marks—awkwardly, ambivalently, precisely rendered question marks.”

Harvard Film Archive

Utterly avoiding the tired clichés of the typical teen film, Maurice Pialat’s Graduate First is a minutely observed, uncommonly honest profile of disaffected French youth in a northern provincial city, and serves as something of an older sibling to L’enfant nue (both were shot in the same blue-collar town of Lens). The film follows the aimless adventures of a group of students who see little point in finishing their baccalauréat when the future promises nothing but dead-end jobs or grinding unemployment. Instead, they drift from bistro to beach, engage in meaningless sex, bicker with their uncomprehending parents, or set out for Paris. The film’s ironic title references the stereotypical response of the French parent to a child’s request for more freedom: ​“Graduate first!” This warts-and-all, slice-of-life portrait of adolescent boredom and sexuality prefigures later works like Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water.

In French with English subtitles

“Graduate First impresses with its ethnographic immediacy; Pialat’s survey of his characters, at once specific and casual, offers up such ineradicable details as the sound of Pop Rocks exploding on the tongue, the fervour of arguments over the merits of Pink Floyd versus Bob Marley, and the snug cut and fit of athletic apparel worn in late-seventies gym classes.”

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

“Pialat creates neither a nostalgic tearjerker nor a sentimental account of early groping sessions. It has no discernable plot. It is rather a chronicle, a slice of life conceived by Pialat as a follow-up to L’enfance nue.”

Jean-Baptiste Morain, Film Comment