Film

In this insightful documentary, director Régis Sauder offers a rejoinder to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial disparagement of Madame de La Fayette’s 17th-century novel The Princess of Clèves as his least favorite book. This beloved tale of love and duty serves as a prism for the challenges of the young working class in contemporary France. Under the stress of preparing for their baccalaureate exams, the students of a Marseille high school analyze this classic text, which has long been a fixture of French classrooms, and find that despite its age and royal-court milieu, it continues to resonate with the hopes, dreams, and heartbreaks of adolescence.