One of Emmanuelle Beart's less known part but one of her most emotionally intense ,"Les Enfants Du Desordre" is a work by Yannick Bellon,once nicknamed the female Andre Cayatte (which ,IMHO ,is no insult for Cayatte paved a reliable way to activist directors ),who was the first in France to tackle the burning subject of rape ,just like a woman would do (she was preceded by American Ida Lupino ).Her work dealing with cancer ("L'Amour Nu") was not as convincing,taking place in privileged milieus whereas her "La Triche" about homosexuality was downright embarrassing :killing the gay at the end of her movie is not an improvement on the American works of the sixties such as "the fox" or "children's hour" !
"Les Enfants " depicts a lost generation ,a distraught youth who finds comfort in drugs .Marie ,an unwed young mother is in a reformatory school and she has been a misfit for most of her life;there is only one scene which features the parents and it's enough to make us comprehend the generation's gap.
If hope can survive ,it's thanks to an educator who tries to pass his love of theater on to them.Robert Hossein ,himself a stage director ,was ideally cast as this man.There's a good chemistry between him and Beart,some kind of love ,even though there's no bed scene between them:anyway it seems that Marie is through with love and men : we see her push a cad away roughly.
Some of Beart's scenes look like improvisation and some are deeply moving.A play taking place at the end of the sixteenth /beginning of the seventeenth century and its dress rehearsal gives the movie an unusual touch and the open ending shows one more time that questions matter more than answers.
