The Beautiful Person

After her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Junie moves to a new Paris high school partway through the year. She joins the class of her cousin Matthias, who brings her into his circle of friends. Junie is withdrawn and lives largely in her own head, yet her looks and her composure draw the attention of the boys around her. She agrees to go out with the calmest and least assuming of them, Otto, but she is also strongly attracted to Nemours, her young Italian teacher, and the situation grows complicated when he responds. The film is an adaptation of Madame de La Fayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves, moving the story from the sixteenth-century court of Henry II to a present-day lycée, with the characters renamed.

Christophe Honoré directed, and wrote the screenplay with Gilles Taurand. It is his fourth feature, arriving after Ma mère, In Paris and Love Songs. Léa Seydoux plays Junie, Louis Garrel plays Nemours, and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet plays Otto; Agathe Bonitzer, Simon Truxillo and Jean-Michel Portal are among the credited cast of twenty-one.

The film runs 97 minutes and was released in France in September 2008. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.6 from around 8,500 votes, and on TMDB 6.5 from roughly 237 votes, placing it in moderate territory with audiences rather than at either extreme.