Bresson's penultimate film is not one of his best, but it remains a
bleakly plausible chronicle of despair among contemporary Parisian
youth. He describes with implacable detail the accumulation of
evidence for that despair, gradually eliminating every reason for the
young protagonist to remain alive. The problem is that the film's
meaning seems preconceived rather than earned, so that the film as a
whole has something of the air of a thesis, and its depressing qualities
come to seem gratuitous, rather than poignant as they were in Mouchette
or Au Hasard, Balthasar. It's still tremendously intense, though.
