BONJOUR TRISTESSE

If ever there was a novel that could be hailed as the ultimate summer coming-of-age, Bonjour Tristesse would be it. Cécile is seventeen and on holiday with her father and his mistress in a beautiful, semi-remote villa in the South of France. Intending to spend her days doing little more than swimming and sun bathing, this plan is threatened when her father invites an old family friend to stay with them. Cut from a different cloth than the frivolous, pleasure seeking father-daughter pair, Anne is cool, calm, and determined to set Cécile on the right path. When it becomes clear that Anne's curtailing might extend well beyond summer, Cécile's youthful meddling results in far more tragedy than she intends.

Written by Françoise Sagan, herself - incredibly – only eighteen years old when it was first published in 1954, the novel is as full of angst as you'd expect from one titled 'Hello Sadness' and narrated by a teenage girl. It is however, not your standard young adult fare. Sagan's masterful evocation of summer is matched only by the clear-eyed precision with which she nails the dramatic, ubiquitous confusion of youth. A beach read that might leave you, as Sagan so succinctly puts it, 'nailed to the sand by all the forces of summer'.

LE RAYON VERT

Moving from the late-teens (of Bonjour Tristesse) to the late-twenties, or thereabouts, of Éric Rohmer's 1986 gem Le Rayon Vert. It is early July and Delphine, still recovering from the break up of a long term relationship two years ago, has just been bailed on by a friend. Not a situation that anyone relishes, and with the mass exodus of locals from Paris in August fast approaching, Delphine is left frantically casting about for new holiday plans.

Reserved, sensitive, and battling the sort of lethargy that so often afflicts when life is an uphill slog, Delphine is perceived as somewhat pathetic by her friends, who offer endless advice and unappealing holiday options. Embarking on a few of their suggestions, restless and dissatisfied she quickly moves on. We begin to see that rather than the opposite, Delphine is fiercely independent and unwilling to compromise. Angry even, at the role that society has cast her in as a single woman of a certain age.

Alone again as she wanders the coastal walls of Biarritz, she overhears a conversation about Jules Verne's novel Le Rayon Vert about the optical phenomenon of the same name. As one character explains, 'when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others too'. Later, a chance encounter with a promising stranger creates the opportunity to observe it for herself, her unsuppressed shriek of excitement the film's final, poignant note.