Les Doigts dans la tête

1974, France, directed by Jacques Doillon

A film that would pair well very with Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, as a Paris-set examination of the lives of young French people in a decade of increasing crisis and ennui to match Pialat's provincial picture. As you might expect for a film set in France in 1974, it is a film very much concerned with worker-employer relations, though having the key conflict between a baker and his employee (rather than, say, between a factory boss and his many underlings) lends the examination of labour issues an extra degree of interest, not least because small business owners have often otherwise been valorised in French cinema (especially in provincial contexts). It's also an unsentimental, sometimes quite warm, occasionally even funny, examination of the way that young people interact and try to negotiate their relationships with one another.