At 29, she's an award-winning French director, but at 13, Diane Kurys was a giddy schoolgirl faced with sadistic schoolmarms, fickle friendships and the mysteries of menstruation. Those tribulations are what this, her first, feature is about. Kurys' alter ego is in the eighth grade at a prissy Paris school, and it's as if the audience is leafing through a journal full of anecdotes about her anxious parents and budding older sister. The year is 1963—we know that from the talk of Kennedy's assassination—but, like any film that deals in universal themes, it could be almost anytime. A blockbuster abroad, it has already been proclaimed French Graffiti. Though it lacks the exuberance of its American precursor, Kurys' film is very funny. French with English subtitles. (PG)
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