Was high school the most emotionally turbulent rite of passage every teenager had to endure? For some, like French director Olivier Assayas, it was a period of time that helped transform him into the person he is today. Those years provided the raw material to create a deeply personal cinematic experience that was not just an artistic triumph in France but earned the director international attention and acclaim. L’eau Froide (English title: Cold Water, 1994) was Assayas’s fifth feature film but he credits it with being the movie that marks his first real breakthrough as a director. The story of Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), a troubled student from an upper-class family, and his on-again, off-again infatuation with Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), a rebellious sixteen-year-old from a divorced working-class couple, is semi-autobiographical in nature with some incidents taken directly from the director’s life. Assayas would later state, “Cinema has the capacity for making you experience moments, emotion in your life and looking back on it I have the strange feeling that this movie belongs to the seventies.”