Peppermint Soda

There aren't many movies about and for teenage girls, but Peppermint Soda (1977, New Yorker, PG, $79.95), Diane Kurys' memoir of two adolescent sisters growing up gawky in 1963 Paris, is one of the rare breed—and a charmer. In her first film, Kurys (A Man in Love) gives a fond, funny, and sometimes painful account of the limbo between childhood and adulthood. It's a distaff version of Francois Truffaut's classic about being misunderstood, The 400 Blows, and actually ends with an homage to that film. The vignettes of school life—witchy teachers, outrageous lies, innocent talk about sex—will be all too familiar to anyone, female or male, who ever wondered when acne would end and life begin. B+