Year of the Jellyfish (1984)

leisurely erotic holiday picture gradually tightens into a nasty psychological thriller, with mother and daughter quietly competing while pretending everything is perfectly civilised. Chris keeps testing Romain, humiliating Vic and using sex as both weapon and proof of her power, yet her confidence starts looking more like wounded vanity. When a jellyfish sting reveals that Romain has a potentially dangerous vulnerability of his own, her sulking obsession begins to acquire a cold sense of purpose. Christopher Frank, adapting his own novel, is less interested in romance than in predators, willing prey and the damage caused by people who mistake desire for control. The pacing can be languid and some dialogue is blunt, but that lazy surface is deceptive: the film slowly turns its postcard paradise poisonous, leaving a queasy impression of youth discovering not love, but the thrill of making adults squirm.

This is pure early-1980s Côte d’Azur decadence, from an era when wealthy Europeans apparently packed three things for summer: sunglasses, cigarettes and flexible morals. Shot around Saint-Tropez, Ramatuelle and Gassin—including Tahiti Beach—the film drinks in the beaches, private clubs, yachts, villas, casino nights and expensive lunches with sand still between everyone’s toes. Renato Berta’s photography makes the heat almost tactile, while the conspicuously ’80s music occasionally barges in like a synthesiser wearing shoulder pads. The vibe sits somewhere between a Françoise Sagan holiday melodrama and a sun-bleached film noir: slow, snobbish, sexy, faintly ridiculous and increasingly sinister. You may arrive for the topless Riviera scenery, but the real hook is watching casual flirtation curdle into jealousy and menace beneath a flawless blue sky.

Valérie Kaprisky plays Chris as a bronzed little menace with a sulky mouth, a magnificent figure and the unnerving stare of someone deciding where to stick the knife. Her performance can feel deliberately blank at times, but that vacancy suits a character who treats seduction as sport and other people as beach toys. She spends an extraordinary amount of the film topless, and Frank’s camera makes no pretence of looking away; the nudity is frequent, relaxed and unabashedly voyeuristic, though the sex remains simulated rather than hardcore. Caroline Cellier is every bit as alluring as Claude, bringing mature confidence, wit and voluptuous glamour to a role that could easily have been reduced to “the hot mother.” Together they provide two very different flavours of temptation: Kaprisky is reckless, petulant and dangerous, while Cellier has the composed sensuality of a woman who knows she does not need to chase anyone.

Chris, a sexy teenager who appears mostly bare-breasted on the French Riviera, has a crush on Romain, her mother’s lover. In reaction to her inability to attract his attention, she experiments with other risque affairs.