A story told from the point of view of a young girl whose parents seem headed for a painful divorce. In American hands this material would become a bitter docudrama, but Diane Kurys somehow seems able to bathe the pain in nostalgia (…) There is no final sense of right and wrong, and no clear sign of how the children survived and adapted to their disturbing summer. Love is declared and defended in the movie, but never quite explained in terms of what it really means to the characters. Is the mother justified in her great passion? What do the children think? What does her lover really feel? It’s not that I want the movie to wrap everything up into a neat package, to explain everything at the end. It’s that I’m not sure if Kurys, beneath her lovingly created period details and her bittersweet nostalgia, knows herself just what she thinks of all of this. — Roger Ebert, 1990.