Product Details

• Actors: Jane Birkin, Mathieu Demy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lou Doillon
• Directors: Agnes Varda
• Format: NTSC, Subtitled, Color
• Language: French, English
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: NC-17
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Prism Entertainment
• Run Time: 80 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B000A0RGWU
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,661 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Continuing her investigations into the everyday lives of women, Agnes Varda trains her expert eye on an unlikely scenario--a love affair between a video-game-obsessed 15-year-old boy, played by her son Mathieu Demy, and a 40-year-old divorcée (Jane Birkin). Based on a short story by Birkin, the film mixes fictional narrative and documentary styles to lend this odd love story depth and compelling sincerity. The match between the lonely and lovelorn Mary Jane (Birkin) and the somewhat oblivious Julien (Demy) provides for humorous scenarios and culminates in a piercing take on life and love.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars a high school boy's fantasy - from the older woman's point of view, November 19, 2010

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Le Petit Amour (VHS Tape)

We first meet Julien (Mathieu Demy), a 14-year-old schoolboy, at a party in the courtyard outside the building where a classmate, Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lives. Upstairs Lucy's mother Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin) is taking care of her sick younger daughter Lou (Lou Doillon); when Julien gets sick from drinking too much, Mary-Jane takes care of him as well, showing him how to force himself to vomit. And the lonely, 40ish divorcee notices how nice and polite Julien is. Her older daughter likes him a lot as well, and she sees a bit of him, and her feelings grow. He's addicted to Kung Fu Master, an arcade game that involves punching and kicking your way to higher and higher levels to save a girl; soon Mary-Jane starts haunting places that have the game. She's in deep - he's just a kid - but her feelings are returned; she tries to deny them to herself and to him, but on a family vacation to visit her parents in England on which she brings Julien along (his parents are in Africa) the feelings burst forth, and life gets complicated for all concerned.

Agnés Varda directs this difficult story, written by herself and Jane Birkin, with sensitivity and a complete lack of sensationalism. The treatment, in terms of explicitness, is strictly PG, and the moral condemnation and outrage that we see onscreen comes almost entirely from two of the characters most involved. In a slight 80 minute running time, we experience not only the trials and heartbreak of a doomed, illicit love affair, but also the scorned feeling of an older sister who feels beaten in the race by her own mother; the different ways in which young boys and older women handle the hearbreak of romance; the burst of passion that can cause an otherwise doting mother to ignore her own young children. It's also just at the time when AIDS is coming into the public eye in France, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle references to the disease and to "safe sex" throughout the film - one taboo subject in a sense mirroring another. There's also a certain play on the typical cultural representations of French and English people, with Mary-Jane's English family seemingly more at ease and open to sexual matters than her younger French children - and Mary-Jane herself more willing to take risks on the other side of the channel, away from home.

It's a beautifully shot and brilliantly acted work all around, and the casting of relatives of the director (Mathieu Demy is her son, by the director Jacques Demy) and Birkin (her parents and her children play their equivalents in the film) adds another layer of "reality" to the whole proceeding. The English scenes in particular have a very warm and familial attitude about them, which makes the chilliness of the climax of the film all the more compelling, though it is inevitable and perhaps justified. It's a film about a person making a choice that she knows is wrong, and having to live with it, and trying hard throughout the film to see a way out for herself that doesn't involve hurting anyone - but being unable to resist the power of desire. I suppose I'm making it sound a bit deep and dark, and overall it is a fairly serious, but it's also, like nearly all of the director's work, marked by a great joy at life, a love for the natural world (even in the midst of a huge city), and a sly and charming sense of humor that peeks out when you least expect it. Perhaps it's fitting that such a very adult film has video games as a theme running throughout, and Varda's choice to begin the film with a live-action re-enactment of a minute of Kung-Fu Master gameplay is a brilliant and hilarious one.

LE PETIT AMOUR (retitled from the French KUNG-FU MASTER! because American distributors were afraid people would think it was a martial arts film!) is unfortunately not available on DVD in the USA, but this VHS is decent enough; it's not letterboxed, but the original aspect ratio is just 1.66:1 so you're only missing a small bit of the frame. Picture and sound are more than adequate. Well worth getting for fans of the director and this kind of humanistic filmmaking, I think this might be the equal of the Varda's previous, much more famous Vagabond with which it shares a certain amount of low-key righteous feminist anger.