Let's be realistic.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This movie is somewhat similar to the more widely available "The Beautiful Person", which features the same two young actresses, Lea Seydoux and Anais Demoustier. I'll defer to other reviewers about the plot since I saw it in French without the benefit of subtitles. But it basically seems to be about a troubled teenage girl who befriends another troubled teenage girl after they are both arrested for shop-lifting. The two girls navigate a world of sex, drugs, and (to the extent it exists anymore) rock and roll.Interestingly, the same night I saw this on TV I also saw the latest American teen clap-trap "Project X". This American movie was in English, of course, but I watched it mostly with the sound down because it was so stupid that I didn't want to devote more than one of my senses to it. It is interesting to compare a typical American teen movie like "Project X" to a typical French teen movie like this. American movies are more fantasy-driven, (allegedly) comical films, usually told from the male perspective of rutting teen virgins, who by the end of the movie inevitably wind up having consequence-free sex with some way-out-of-their-league fantasy girl that a rutting teen virgin like themselves would probably have no shot at in real life. French movies are more serious, adult affairs often told from the perspective of a teenage girl. They usually offer a much more downbeat or ambivalent view of sex and are (at least, marginally) more realistic.French movies are more likely to show (full-frontal) nudity and more graphic sex. And it usually involves the female protagonists themselves. In the American films there are some occasional bare breasts, but it's almost never the "good girl" love interest, but some secondary actress with fake silicone boobs. The two actresses in this movie, Seydoux and Demoustrier, are both older than they look (so no one should feel TOO guilty about enjoying their nude/sex scenes), but they are still pretty believable as young teenagers. Because of the nudity, more graphic sexuality, and girls that look (and sometimes are) under 18, many French movies like this probably wouldn't go over very well in America, but really, which kind of movie is more likely to encourage teenagers to experiment with sex(to the extent that teenagers ANYWHERE need much encouragement)? I DO know which of these movies are more interesting to mature adults. I sorely regret wasting even one of my senses on "Project X", but I would actually be interested in seeing this movie again with some English subtitles.

Prudence Friedmann is alone. Her sister is on her own. Her father is working in Canada and she is left to cope with the sudden death of her mother. Set in Paris, Rebecca Zlotowski's sensitive Dear Prudence is an impressionistic story of a sad and lonely adolescent who begins to lose her bearings as a result of her inability to grieve her mother's loss. In a beautifully nuanced performance by Lea Seydoux as Prudence, this personal film manages to avoid the self-conscious clichés of adolescent angst, creating a believable three-dimensional human being, a 16-year-old in pain trying to navigate in an emotional no-man's land.As the film begins, Prudence (Seydoux) and Maryline (Agathe Schlenker) are arrested and strip-searched for shoplifting but released when the evidence is hidden too deep to be discovered. Afterward she seeks out her fellow offender and invites her to her house, giving her the keys to come and go as she pleases. Soon Maryline introduces Prudence to her friends on the motorcycle racing circuit at Rungis and the naïve young girl who is starving for love, skips school and becomes involved with the fast and chaotic world of bike racing. Although, at the home of her aunt and uncle, the meaning of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are explained, she ignores the celebrations and traditions of her Jewish heritage and continues to seek adventure among the bikers.She becomes involved with a boy, Franck (Johan Libereau), but he seems to her to be interested only in sex. When she walks out of a movie leaving Franck feeling angry and deserted, she goes to his house to try and talk to his mother, but she is too busy or just not interested and Prudence reaches the outer edge of despair. Filled with frequent use of female nudity and accompanied by a pounding pop-rock score, Dear Prudence allows the turbulence of an adolescent to come alive, managing to convey a quiet emotional power that is tender and haunting. Only when Prudence witnesses the death of a young bike racer on the circuit does she begin to touch her own deep and suppressed grief, perhaps realizing, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, "Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion".