Adieu Philippine

Jacques Rozier made four features in fifty years and spent most of his career being described as the great lost director of the French New Wave. Adieu Philippine, shot in 1960 and stuck in post-production until 1963, was a commercial failure that Truffaut and Godard both championed; Truffaut called it the clearest success of the new cinema, and praised its spontaneity as the product of long and careful work.

Michel is a set technician at the state television studios, waiting for his conscription papers for Algeria. He meets Liliane and Juliette, two aspiring models who do everything together and have an arrangement about not letting men come between them, and begins seeing them both. The three drift to Corsica for the summer, joined by a chancer producer and various hangers-on. It was shot on location with non-professionals and post-synchronised almost entirely, which is where the two years went.

The war is never dramatised and is present in every scene: everybody is killing time before something they will not name. Rozier's gift is for the texture of aimlessness — a scooter, a beach, an argument about nothing that lasts ten minutes — and for capturing young people who are performing for each other constantly. Restored and reissued in 2018, it now looks like one of the two or three films that best preserve what France felt like in 1960.