the leading man is my tpye

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

A bunch of young women showering, bathing, eating, swimming, and sleeping. Mostly naked or half-naked. Most scenes are so heavily contrasted that most of the time you cannot see the faces of the women. Add a very soft lens, no dialog whatsoever, and a synth creating some kind of muzak background to all the scenes and the result is one of the most boring films ever produced. At least in 2009 the DVD is very soft. Possilby in high resolution and without faded colors this could be some mood creating film. What kind of mood? Well, depends on you but maybe thinking back to your youth when you first started to watch beautiful women. I would much rather recommend the director's Tendres cousins, which has a funny storyline, in addition to beautiful women.

The usual rap on French director David Hamilton is that he is a "pervert". Give me a break--if every man who still felt some twinge of attraction to girls this age (16-20 years old) were to drop dead tomorrow, only the most committed homosexuals would be left to re-populate the earth. This is a French movie so many of the actresses here may not be "legal" by American standards. But if "perverts" (and by that I mean men) really want to fantasize about barely underage high school girls, they can watch an innocuous 1980's French nudie movie like this and really use their imagination to create sexual scenarios, or they can get an American-made "barely legal" hardcore porn flick where a young-looking eighteen year old in pig-tails and a school uniform gets gang-sodomized and triple-penetrated and they only have to pretend she's a year or two younger. Which do you think is more harmful to society? But the problem I have with David Hamilton is that if it were possible to fall asleep with an erection, his movies could no doubt induce it. They are languorously slow-paced even by French standards. They are like still photography (which was Hamilton's principal career) at 24 frames a second. Unlike "Bilitis", this movies makes no effort to have a plot or drama (which might be for the best if you've seen "Bilitis"). It's basically just endless shots of a gaggle of young French nymphs sleeping (often in nude), showering, skinny-dipping, sunbathing (usually naked), fixing each others hair (in various states of undress), or having topless, slow-motion pillow fights. But it's all a lot more boring than it sounds. I can't really fault Hamilton's photography, but he REALLY overuses the soft-focus (at times I wanted to grab his camera, wipe all the vaseline off the lens, and pull the damn focus!). I CAN definitely fault his taste in music. I had to laugh at an earlier reviewer who said this movie could be used to treat sex offenders. It IS kind of like the "ludvico technique" in "A Clockwork Orange" in that you have this footage of tantalizing naked nubiles juxtaposed with truly nausea-inducing music (although at least you don't have the banal dialogue of "Bilitis"--there's no dialogue at all actually, just a lot of giggling). Sure, this would probably work on sex offenders, but it would doubtlessly work on normal "perverts" too--not to mention guys like me, who of course only watched this disgusting filth to see the lush St. Tropez scenery--and now it's ruined forever (Damn you, David Hamilton!)

I'm not going to bother with introducing David Hamilton and explaining the controversial nature of his work, if you don't know about him a wikipedia search should . I do think some of his photography is rather good, and artful enough that it doesn't feel sleazy at all, and remember enjoying both "Tendres cousines" (which has found its way into modern pop culture due to being referenced several times by "Arrested Development") and "Premiers désirs" (starring a young Emmanuelle Beart), although I haven't seen either film in a while and don't remember them, except for the former being somewhat alarmingly close to justifying the accusations against Hamilton for being a 'child pornographer'. "Un été à Saint-Tropez" is inconceivably awful and laughable as a film, however. I'd rather sit through the somewhat lame yuk-yuk lines in "Tendres cousines" than this thing ever again. Awful use of slow-motion, including one five-minute long pillow-fight scene, no dialogue, no plot, this one truly does expose Hamilton as someone who gets off on seeing nude teenage girls and doesn't particularly care about anything else. Still, it's not all that creepy, as most of these girls appear to be between 16-18, maybe a little older even, and a couple of them really are gorgeous. As soft porn the movie will probably work for desperate ephebophiles, but it's too lunk-headed and awfully-made to work as a film, and Hamilton's soft-focus photography is occasionally nice to look at, but wasted on a pointless piece of crap.

Just saw this movie in Internet and I'm still under the influence of the magic Hamilton achieved here. No dialogs, no apparent plot, looking more like a looooong Playboy (or whatsoever) clip shot by a professional photographer than really a movie.But the result... Magic! Hard not being affected by so much beautifulness. Eight lovely teenagers moving around the screen, in clothes or naked, during almost an hour feels like hitting the Heavens! Be that as it may, when you look for a Hamilton movie, you're looking for what is plenty shown on this one: young women. That's all the film is about, and is all the film has to offer you: beautiful young women. If this is what you are looking for, then this one is for you. And is the best he did, unfortunately the last one. It's a shame that this kind of work of art cannot be done anymore.10 out of 10, because it's the last one of it's genre!