Synopsis
Maurice Pialat examines the seemingly dead-end future of a number of young French teenagers living in a northern mining town, in his social-realist drama PASSE TON BAC D'ABORD. A group of friends, coming to the end of their school years, fill their days with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Some lapse into debauchery, others enter into loveless marriages. A few even stay the course and get their diplomas, only to find their prospects are not much improved. Pialat's vision may appear grim, but his portrait of suburban youth is haunting in its authenticity. Following on from his 1970s cycle of turbulant dramas--notably L'enfance nue (1967)--the film is a very worthy addition to any Pialat-fan's collection.

****

The world sometimes seems divided into two camps: those who recall their teenage years as having been an exhilarating dream, and those who remember them as having been an infernal, nightmarish hell. With all this in mind, it might do to describe Passe ton bac d'abord... [Graduate First... / Pass Your Bac First...] as Maurice Pialat's "The Best Years of Our Lives", while bearing in mind all that such a description might suggest. It's an elastic, unsparing portrait of teenage life in the suburbs of France from an era when the phrase "sixteen candles" still might have first conjured the image of flames. A group of young actors including several local unknowns -- Philippe Marlaud, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepczynski, and Sabine Haudepin (once the little girl of Truffaut's Jules et Jim), among others -- make up the cluster of friends adrift beneath the twilight of their school years. There's drama, violence, and pot-induced laughs -- group holidays, indiscriminate sex, advances from teachers twenty-five years their seniors, attempted moves to Paris, and few prospects of passing the bac, the final set of exams French students take before embarking into the world to... do what? Marking the last work of Pialat's turbulent cycle of films made in the 1970s, Passe ton bac d'abord... is the brilliant spiritual sequel to the great filmmaker's feature-debut L'enfance nue -- picked up again from a vantage ten years on from the lives of the earlier film's protagonists. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Maurice Pialat's teenage drama in a beautiful new transfer for the first time on home video in the UK.

Gary Tooze