Cheap Premiers Desirs (DVD) (Emmanuelle Beart) Price

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Interesting for David Hamilton Fans
"Premiers Desirs" is a typical David Hamilton film. The plot is of little interest. The point of a David Hamilton motion picture is to show very slim, mostly blond, mostly nordic, adolescent girls, not quite finished with puberty, prancing, preening, swimming, or showering in a state of complete undress. "Premiers Desirs" concerns four young girls spending their summer vacation together on the Mediterranean. Three of the girls attempt to row out to an offshore island at night, are caught in a storm, and shipwrecked. The fourth, the wise one, played by an 18-year-old Emmanuelle Beart, stays behind. The most important of the girls for the story, Caroline, becomes infatuated with a local wealthy resident, who owns the island, and who is married to a famous concert pianist who looks more like a swimsuit model. The other two girls hook up with two boys of their own age. Beart does not participate in any of this nonsense, although she has one brief nude scene roughly midway in the film. At the end of the film, the concert pianist dies in a plane crash and Caroline loses no time in consoling the husband and attaining womanhood. Such is the film.

The film, apparently, was a French-German coproduction; hence, many of the cast and crew are German and some of the actors have obviously been dubbed into French. The DVD, according to Jef Films, Inc., is widescreen and in French with optional English subtitles.

Beart fans interested mostly in seeing her nude would be best advised to see Claude Berri's "Manon of the Spring" (1986) or Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" (1991), both very excellent films. "Manon of the Spring" is the second instalment of a two-part film, of which the first part is "Jean de Florette" (1986). "La Belle Noiseuse," approximately four hours long, devotes two hours to scenes of Beart as a nude artist's model.

David Hamilton, who began as a fashion photographer, made his considerable reputation from a large number of glossy and beautifully executed coffee-table-sized photobooks of undraped adolescent girls, soft-focused, highly romanticized, and decorous almost to the point of being chaste. In 1977 he began making motion pictures with the same general theme as his books. He made five altogether: "Bilitis" (1977), "Laura" (1979), "Tendres Cousines" (1980), "Premiers Désirs" (1983), and "A Summer in Saint-Tropez" (1984). Four of these have been available for a while on VHS. The fifth, "Premiers Désirs," now available on DVD, has never been released theatrically or on VHS in the US. I know it only from a PAL VHS tape.

Unfortunately, Hamilton, while brilliant at photographic composition and with a keen eye for the sensuous, fails as a motion-picture director. Apart from the images, his films are not very interesting. The scripts are dull and predictable, and the mostly wooden dramatic performances of his adolescent and adult stars are less than praiseworthy. If you are a David Hamilton fan and collector as I am, you will not be able to pass up the opportunity to have any of his films on VHS or, better still in the present case, DVD. Otherwise, rent before you buy.

David Hamilton is best appreciated in his photographic books. Most of these are now out of print and fetch obscene prices at used booksellers. The best introduction to Hamilton's work is probably "David Hamilton: 25 Years of an Artist" (1998), still available from amazon.con.