Friends

 

Directed By Lewis Gilbert

97 min | UK | English and Thai | English and Thai Subtitles | 1971

With one of their fathers recently deceased and the other hardly there, fate brings together fourteen-year-old Michelle, a young orphaned girl (Anicée Alvina) who has been taken in by her cousin who doesn’t want her, and fifteen-year-old Paul, an English boy (Sean Bury) studying in France and from a rich family, in a chance encounter at the zoo in Paris. Instant friends, the young couple flees Paris on impulse, and takes refuge in a tiny cottage owned by the girl’s father in the Camargue near Arles in the South of France. With only each other and a growing love blossoming between them, they make a new life for themselves. Michelle gets pregnant, so they “get married” by simulating a ceremony, by following an actual wedding performed in the local church. It is just the pure innocence of youth that puts Paul and Michelle apart from the adults. Soon, a baby is born to them, with Paul acting as midwife with the know-how the couple picked up from reading a book on how babies are born that Paul bought in a bookshop in Arles. They baptize the infant by themselves at the same church. Michelle begins to raise their infant named Sylvie while Paul goes to work everyday. Everything is idyllic until the police finally locate the boy’s workplace.

 

No trailer available, the beginning of the movie with an Elton John’s song