Les Roseaux Sauvages (1994)

France 110m, Colour
Director: André Téchiné; Cast: Élodie Bouchez, Gaël Morel, Stéphane Rideau, Frédéric Gorny

Wild Reeds is a beautifully photographed coming of age story set at the end of the Algerian war which provides a political subtext for a group of teenagers at a boarding school in rural France. Filled with the requisite brooding, teen angst and sexual experimentation for the genre, the character’s overly intellectual dialogue is pretentious, and eventually pretty annoying. Likewise, as I near the end of the 1001 list, I’ve had just about enough of the Algerian War as a backdrop in French films (Klaus Ming May 2016).

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