Cinema: A Blown Seed

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THE FIRST TIME Directed and Written by Claude Berri

Claude is nearly 17, and the only thing in his head is, to employ a euphemism, girls. Like every teen-age male in creation, he sees the world through a spermy haze, a green fog of concupiscence. He runs after girls in the street, and when he overtakes one, doesn't know where to put his eyes, his hands, his conversation. He is quite normal.

Though nonsense of this kind is timeless, the farce is set in Paris in 1952, and it is clear that Director Claude Berri regards The First Time, like his earlier films The Two of Us and Marry Me, Marry Me, as a roguish memoir. The mighty engines of nostalgia come into play as male viewers in their 40s, harassed by their own teen-age children and the spores of mid-life fungus, look backward with Berri. It is a rueful pleasure to watch Claude and his randy school friends stumble rubber-kneed after anything in skirts. The viewer smiles to himself and thinks, "My God, yes, it really was that crazy."

Female viewers may respond with anything from detached amusement to fury, because the film is utterly and blissfully sexist. If a defense must be advanced for this undiplomatic realism, it is that Claude is as helpless as a blown seed. This prank of nature is the comedy's single but sufficient joke.

What is especially likable about the film is that Claude (Alain Cohen) is neither haunted nor hypersensitive, as teen agers customarily are in memoirs. He is a fairly good sort. His father, lost in the swamp of his mid-40s, can't quite figure out what's wrong with him. But he senses that the problem has something to do with the generative urge. He speaks with love of his marriage to Claude's mother, and it is clear that the love that is evident within the family has given Claude enough ballast to steady him a bit. The movie's final frames show Claude not with a girlfriend but at a family picnic, watching his father and little sister play catch with a beach ball. The point is small, but not hard to see: for better or worse, the boy shown here will be a father, long after he has stopped brooding about being a lover .

−J.S.