Movie: Friends (Lewis Gilbert, 1971)
Paul Harrison (Sean Bury) drives around Paris in a classic open-roof Mustang. He wears a suit and tie, complemented by a leather hat and sunglasses, as he picks up Michelle (Anicee Alvina). They've only met recently, but she is intrigued by his take-charge demeanor, even when she finds out the car is stolen. "Stop it", she says, secretly hoping he won't. "You'll get into trouble." "I am always in trouble. I am thinking of taking it up professionally", Paul quips in return. It is clear, Paul is the embodiment of suave sophistication, with a hint of danger. Paul is also 15 years old.
Lewis Gilbert knows exactly what he is doing here. Before Friends, he had directed Alfie, with Michael Caine as a womaniser in Swinging Sixties London, and Sean Connery as James Bond in You Only Live Twice. It's compelling for teenagers to see themselves as these kinds of men (or as the women that appeal to these men) and Friends lets them live out that fantasy, or so you'd think. Things become more complicated when Paul and Michelle keep on driving, escaping from their adult guardians. They end up in Arles, in the holiday home of her deceased parents where they run out of food after a few weeks. Soon, he is forced to go out every morning looking for work on the downlow. Long scenes of hard manual labor in the morasses of the Camargue (a wetland in Southern France) are followed by difficult conversations between Paul and Michelle, confronting the challenges of poverty.
The film shows Paul being angry with his dad for typically adolescent reasons (he reprimands his son for missing classes, and is about to remarry a proudly posh woman), while hiding its own 'mature' criticism in plain sight; the father is a Brit living in France making business deals over the phone with faceless Americans. For her part, following the death of her parents, Michelle has been taken in by her cousin. She organises drugged up parties that try and fail to revive the magic of flower power, while her no-good philandering husband Pierre keeps trying to make a move for Michelle. In other words, all main adult characters are essentially symbols of the lost ideals of the 1960's and the kids' new life on the land is a rejection of contemporary society. That's fair, but much less recognisable as an appealing mainstream teenage fantasy. The question of who the film is for becomes more relevant when after many scenes teasing it, Paul and Michelle finally have sex. It results in some stretches that can be described as 9/12 Weeks with teens (but not for teens), which is not quite the tagline you want. Sean Bury and Anicee Alvine were respectively 17 and 18 when the film came out, but their characters are heavily eroticised 15/14-year olds. What makes the whole thing more unseemly is that the film wants to be both a serious consideration of what happens when a pregnancy forces teens to act beyond their age, and coyly melodramatic smut.
I can't find any reference to the film being inspired by the Beatles song, despite it being about an English "Paul Harrison" (with a hairstyle that definitely reminds of the relevant Paul and Harrison) falling in love with a French girl named Michelle. It even seems to go out of its way to not directly associate with the band by having Elton John compose the entire soundtrack, including "Michelle's Song'. It plays during a montage and has lyrics literally describing what's on screen. The official story is that Lewis Gilbert wanted to make a version of The Blue Lagoon, but couldn't get the rights for it, and then decided to adapt the story that originally inspired The Blue Lagoon. That's probably true, but it would be very easy to believe that the film started off as a Michelle-adaptation until, seeing what shape it took, The Beatles decided to run as far away as possible from it.
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