LOVE IS MORE IMPORTANT

By RICHARD CORLISS

There's a beautiful scene between two intimate friends, Ma o ta (Elodie Bouchez) and Francois (Gael Morel), in Andra Tachina's Wild Reeds, set in the south of France in 1962. The two teens have kept company partly to defer any plunge into sexual commitment. Now Francois confesses he has had sex with someone else. Maite is shocked. But with another boy -- and she feels a kind of relief. As Smoke Gets in Your Eyes plays soulfully, she pulls Francois into a slow-dance clinch. Then, abruptly, the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann comes on. The two start jitterbugging, Maite breaks into a giddy radiance, and with each twirl the two seem to lose years and cares-briefly recapturing a joyous, preadolescent innocence.

As the Algerian war stumbles blindly to a close, its fatal chaos is felt back home, where tragedy mixes with the melodrama that informs a teenager's every waking moment. Brains, groins, hearts-all work overtime in Francois, MiIte and their friends; they face their glandular convulsions with a wonderful seriousness. Swathing them in the sunlight and streams of Provence, Tachina treats all the kids (and their teachers) with affection and respect. He knows that for these handsome idealists, love is as important as sex. They are defining their blossoming identities by discovering the people they can't live without.

For French film in the coming years, one of those people will be Bouchez. Emotions play volcanically on her dark features; she illuminates Maite's moods with the flick of a pout or smile. Wild Reeds is a courtly ballad to intelligent passion, and Bouchez is its princess.

--R.C.