RogerTheMovieManiac88 Viewing this free-wheeling road movie from 1962 was a sheer delight. It was a revelation and many times more captivating than I had anticipated. Director Jacqueline Audry creates an episodic and lightweight yet, on the whole, charming concoction replete with a dazzling selection of some of France's greatest stars of the silver screen.The plot, such as it is, follows eighteen-year-old Agathe (Agathe Aems) as she ventures south, harbouring the wish to eventually reach the glistening idyll of the Cote d'Azur. Young Agathe Aems really turns in a sparkling performance as the journeying ingenue who links the movie's threads. She proffers forth to the viewer a character who is single-minded, mischievous and manipulative yet, at the same time, full of the adventurous joy and vigour of youth. Though I am unfamiliar with her life off-screen, I find it frankly astonishing that Aems has not appeared in a movie since.'Les Petits Matins' is, as I indicated, presented as a series of sketches. Agathe hops from car to lorry to motorcycle and carriage as she edges circuitously towards her dream destination in the sunny south. She encounters, along the way, a diverse array of quirky characters who span the breadth of human nature. An all-star supporting cast which includes Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, Noel-Noel and Robert Hossein appear as these often quirky characters who flesh out the somewhat thin premise. There is a gently satirical slant to a number of the segments as some of the stars send-up their typical on-screen personas to great effect.I delighted in the witty dialogue of Pierre Laroche (Audry's husband) and Pierre Pelegri. The translation by Epilogue for the high-quality subtitles on TV5 Monde also added greatly to my enjoyment of the movie. However, this is not a movie of great importance. Rather, it is one that is immensely pleasing to watch and simply savour for its entertainment value. Along the route to her dreams, Agathe is naive and delicate, tender and insouciant. It is a performance of zest and freshness that lifted 'Les Petits Matins' into my heart.

dbdumonteil Jacqueline Audry is France's Ida Lupino:she was a director when women were only meant to be actresses,film editors or script girls.Her work begins to surface again,but really little by little.Some critics said that the laurels Agnès Varda won were actually Jacqueline Audry's .She had only one subject: woman.But who could do it better than a woman? She was probably the first artist to cast a lesbian as a lead (in Jean-Paul Sartre's "huis clos",all the same!);just before "les petits matins" ,she made "le secret du chevalier d'Eon" which cast Andrée Debar as a woman dressed up as a man."Les petits matins" is a story of eighteen-year old Agathe with a firm independence of men even if she uses them to get to the côte d'azur.Along the way she meets a lot of people-because it's finally a road movie-,mostly men ,whom the director does not spare :the macho proud of their brand new car,the forty-something who wants to take Agathe home,the strange handsome guy (Robert Hossein)under his mother 's thumb -a spoof on Hitchcock's characters?-.This is very light stuff,nothing intellectual ,but often charming and there's a bevy of famous actors:Jean -Claude Brialy,Claude Rich,Lino Ventura,François Perrier,Pierre Brasseur,and the couple Bernard Blier/Arletty who team up for the first time since Marcel Carné's "Hôtel du Nord" (1938).Plus two singers ,the first of whom plays but does not sing (Gilbert Becaud who wrote "let it be me" and "what now my love?"),the second sings the title song but does not play.(Charles Aznavour)Agathe Aems who plays the lead never made another movie before or since.