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Film: The Adolescent →
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The Adolescent is set in the summer of 1939, when 13-year-old Marie travels with her parents to her grandparents' home in a remote Auvergne village. The coming-of-age that unfolds there is quietly painful: Marie discovers her own femininity and falls for a young Jewish doctor, only to find he is drawn to her mother instead. Directed by Jeanne Moreau, the film captures the idyllic surface of rural French life on the eve of the Second World War, with the emotional disruption kept largely interior.
About The Adolescent
The Adolescent is a French drama film directed by Jeanne Moreau in 1978, released January 1979. It was entered into the 29th Berlin International Film Festival. Set deep in the French countryside just before the start of World War II, it shows the idyllic life of a remote village in the mountainous Auvergne where a family from Paris has come to holiday with relatives. The family get-together marks a coming-of-age for daughter Marie, the adolescent of the title.
From the Wikipedia article The_Adolescent_(film), available under CC BY-SA.
Series like The Adolescent
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Toute la vie
Young women between 12 and 17 face the pressures of early womanhood inside an institution built around their specific situation.
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The Youth Memories
A group of young people in 1970s Beijing grow up side by side, chasing dreams while struggling through the conditions of their era.
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The Parents
Three sons at very different stages of growing up create friction and comedy within a family navigating everyday domestic life.
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The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Teenagers at an American high school define themselves through love triangles, rumour, and the turbulence of adolescence.
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Adolescence
A 13-year-old accused of murder forces the adults around him — family, therapist, detective — to confront what they missed.
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Marie Antoinette
A teenage girl navigates an unfamiliar court, an arranged marriage, and the pressure to live as others demand.
Books to read after The Adolescent
Book
Fourteen
A 14-year-old girl finds her private life turned into material by her own mother, just as a new boy unsettles everything further.
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Ecole des femmes
A 17th-century French comedy turns on a guardian's possessive control over a young woman desired by a younger rival.
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A time to love
A 15-year-old girl slowly understands persecution after her Jewish best friend is forced to flee wartime Germany.
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Adolescence
A carefully organised study of adolescence as it plays out in contemporary society, approached with research and context.
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Summer of '42
A coming-of-age story set on an island during the summer of 1942, centred on a young man and a woman named Dorothy.
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Back When We Were Grownups
A woman in midlife looks back at the moment she married at 19 and wonders who she was before that choice defined her.
More films like The Adolescent
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The Party
A 13-year-old French girl navigates upheaval when divorce and a move to Paris reshape her familiar world.
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Little Thirteen
Teenagers from different social backgrounds negotiate sexuality as a stand-in for the emotional connection they lack.
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The 15 Year Old Girl
A middle-aged divorcee takes his teenage son and the son's friend Juliette on an isolated Ibiza holiday.
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Adolescence
Adult silence around sexuality leaves young people to navigate its consequences alone and unprepared.
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An Adolescent
An aimless man's life shifts entirely when an unexpected encounter with a young woman called Yoko changes his direction.
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A Real Young Girl
A sulky girl spending another dull summer at her parents' house wrestles with desire, fantasy, and her own emerging sexuality.
Frequently asked
What should I watch after The Adolescent?
For other films about the discomforts of girlhood and summer, A Real Young Girl and The Party are the closest fits — both centre on a young French protagonist navigating desire and a disrupted sense of self. Little Thirteen pushes the same territory into a more contemporary, ensemble register.
Are there TV shows with the same quiet, coming-of-age tone as The Adolescent?
Adolescence (2025) shares the specific age — a 13-year-old whose inner world is opaque to the adults around them — though it arrives from a crime angle. Marie Antoinette echoes the experience of a teenage girl pulled into an adult world she did not choose and cannot control.
What books are similar to The Adolescent?
A Time to Love is the closest structural match: a teenage girl in a pre-war European setting coming to understand the world through loss and the departure of a Jewish friend. Fourteen shares the texture of a young girl's life being shaped — and observed — by the adults closest to her.