Graduate First (1978) User Reviews

Quite the surprise

[Gloede_The_Saint · 8/10 · 3 December 2012]

Being one of the more overlooked and forgotten Pialats this took me quite off guard. This seems to be the point where Pialat really changed his style. This is actually quite warm, even though we're still, at least in parts, the objective observer. We follow the lives of a group of young friends in their final year of high school, who drift about, make out, have sex, get married, get low paying jobs, etc.

The first half really felt like a more low down contemporary French version of American Graffity only without the cars. It has quite a bit of charm, and the characters are quite the personalities. Slightly lost it's drive towards the middle, when they went on vacation, and the tension with parents, etc. was rather left behind, but it went strong till the end - though I must admit I was slightly disappointed by the final reveal. Anyhow, pretty spectacular stuff. And very unexpected coming from Pialat. 8.5/10.

Kids in Northern France

[bob998 · 7/10 · 16 March 2006]

Not a strong film by Pialat. I have seen a couple of great ones from him, but this one is just too disjointed, with too many characters demanding our attention to work well. Working class life, with its uncertainties and narrower horizons, was a specialty with Pialat. His treatment of Loulou's family a year later would be masterful, but these teenagers waiting to write the ''bac'' don't have enough individuality to interest me. They go on a trip to the seashore that looks promising but not much happens.

Philippe Marlaud and Sabine Haudepin play the principals and they are good (pity that Marlaud died at 22). There is a story line involving a married girl and the boy she really loves that is more interesting. The feeling of regret over lost opportunities is strong.

Pialat's powers of vision and empathy give his work an almost unnerving connective power

[philosopherjack · 26 January 2024]

Maurice Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord looks at a loosely-constituted group of young people in the dead-end French town of Lens, adults in some ways (they drink and smoke and are sexually active) but not yet in others (some are still in school, few if any are economically self-sufficient). The film starts and ends in philosophy class, the teacher instructing the students on the necessity to free one's mind from preconceptions, an admonition hopelessly at odds with a reality defined by lack of economic and cultural opportunity, by deadening repetition, by a peer group that makes major life decisions such as marriage or pregnancy on the basis of entirely short-term calculations. Of course, many films have covered such territory, but as always, Pialat's powers of vision and empathy give his work an almost unnerving connective power. The film certainly feels naturalistic and drawn from life, but is also muscularly shaped and balanced, the mundane central realities offset with a sense of possibilities around the edges. The most striking of these is perhaps the late arrival of a Rolls-Royce, its passage through the streets given quite a build-up, turning out to contain two model agency representatives who want to offer one of the girls a contract; whether or not the opportunity is worth pursuing, the broader point is that the parents dismiss the two out of hand without even a minimum amount of due diligence regarding what's being offered and where it might lead. As a different kind of example of the film's acuity: during a trip to the coast, one of the group meets a girl from Paris who in her unforced way embodies the greater inner and outer resources that they lack; he has sex with her (at her initiation) and later shows off to the others the exotic undergarment that he took from her, but the scene is more poignant than triumphant, an embodiment of distances that can only momentarily be traversed.