My First Time (2012)

Here we have a French romantic drama from 2012, the sort of film that believes a tortured young man and a fragile young woman are sufficient material for ninety minutes of cinema. Zachary collects conquests and fails at school. Sarah controls her life with precision. They fall in love. The year is spent. That is the entire proposition. No subtext about representation, no gestures toward identity, no climate anxiety creeping in through the windows. The film is almost admirably immune to the present moment, like a bottle of wine sealed before the cork was invented.

The director is a woman, which in some circles might raise a flicker of expectation. But expectation is not evidence. The story remains a conventional heterosexual coming-of-age romance, its gaze fixed on the interior weather of two young people who have not yet discovered that their problems are structural. There is no racial consciousness, no economic critique, no body positivity, no neurodivergent character to be found. The film does not lecture. It does not even clear its throat. It simply observes two attractive people making a mess of things, which is a narrative strategy so old it predates the concept of strategy.

We are left, then, with a film that scores a flat zero across every marker of contemporary social awareness. Not a failure of craft, mind you. A failure of relevance, if relevance is the metric. This is a specimen of pure, unadulterated romantic drama, preserved in amber, untouched by the cultural conversations of the last decade. It is almost restful. One could recommend it to anyone suffering from message fatigue, provided they can tolerate the absence of message entirely.