Goodbye First Love

(15) 110mins

It’s supposed to be unbearably boring hearing about other people’s dreams. But often that’s not nearly as bad as hearing about other people’s formative love affairs. Watching vain, drippy, lugubrious teenager Camille (Lola Créton) fall in and out of love with dumb puppy Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is a bit like watching someone cut their toenails: intimate, sure, but not in any enlightening way. The fact that this is a prettily put-together film, with a lot of nice shots of breasts and landscapes and such, doesn’t alter the fact that it is about absolutely nothing, barring the journey of the protagonist from slavish absorption in a man to slavish absorption in herself. All else is unlikable people exchanging faux-profundities. It’s hard to see what the filmmakers think they are revealing – whether we’re supposed to laugh at these people’s awfulness, or sympathise with them. This might just work as aversion therapy for people who think that they miss being young. (But even they would have to suffer through the intolerable retro-folk soundtrack).

Selected release from Fri 4 May.