Come Undone

The elusive, quicksilver nature of young love is often reduced to crude simplicities by the movies, but director Sebastien Lifshitz and writing partner Stephane Bouquet have observed it with a superb balance of aesthetics and insight in Come Undone.

A melancholy valentine to broken hearts and lost innocence.

A delicately managed piece that is by turns intimately detailed and elliptical, and that's an approach that suits the tangled emotions of its two protagonists.

Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.

If the sensitive coming-of-age love story is a well-worn tradition in gay cinema, Come Undone is at the very least a superior example of it.

Achingly slow, at times bleak and, in the end, frustratingly and regrettably, rather pointless.

One of those French films whose makers won't lower themselves to tell a story in a way that is entertaining or compelling.