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A seventeen-year-old Swedish girl, Liv, has been living for several weeks with a baker's apprentice, Chris. Through his union, he is fighting a battle with his boss, and it appears that in the dehumanizing conditions of industrial life, laziness and rebellion may be the only appropriate responses. Chris' former girlfriend, Rosette, and his best friend, Leon, move in with them and inevitable tensions build up. The setting is largely confined to an apartment within which the director, Jacques Doillon, explores the problem of working class youths who resist being drafted into the routines of industry, but who lack the ambition and abilities to rise above them. Francois Truffaut has praised the film's integration of political observation with broader humanistic concerns, comparing it to Jean Renoir's Toni.
'As an attempt to link cinema-verite spontaneity with definite, preconceived structure and style, and in its avoidance of commercialism, it represents a praiseworthy attempt at alternative cinema.'
George Ellis, Take One
Silver Hugo, Best First Film, Chicago 1975.