'Le Grand Chemin (The Grand Highway)' (NR)

At the beginning of Jean-Loup Hubert's "The Grand Highway," a scrawny, frightened-looking 9-year-old named Louis (Antoine Hubert, who is the director's son) is taken by his very pregnant mother (Christine Pascal) to stay with her old girlfriend Marcelle (Anemone) in a village in Brittany until the baby is born. And immediately the world begins to look like a threatening, unfriendly place.

Louis' first impression is not a lasting one. But before it's amended, the boy will have to go through many of the sometimes painful experiences from which coming-of-age stories are made -- things like having a savvy young tomboy stuff eels down the front of your swim trunks, or getting a stomachache from eating green apples, or learning how to urinate against a wall.

"The Grand Highway," which was the highest-grossing film in France last year, is a summer-of-my-initiation movie, and if it sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is -- enervatingly familiar.

The movie supposedly springs from the director's own boyhood experiences, but aside from the loving way in which the Brittany countryside is presented, the film feels as if it could have been assembled out of bits taken from a score of other coming-of-age movies.

The only glimmer of originality is in the relationship between Marcelle and her carpenter husband Pelo (Richard Bohringer), and the battle they wage over the boy's affections. Bohringer, who played the Zen master hero in "Diva," is particularly good in his scenes with the young boy; in them, you can see Pelo's need to find an outlet for his paternal impulses and guide this shy fellow into manhood.

Marcelle, on the other hand, wants to pamper and coddle Louis and protect him from the intimidating outside world. There's a reason for this, as we later discover, that goes beyond the usual maternal protectiveness, but when it's unveiled, we feel that, once again, the film moves back onto well-trod ground.

If Hubert had been able to infuse his account of this formative country vacation with a spirit of personal revelation -- if we thought that somehow this is a film that had to be made -- it might have felt more substantial. But as it is, it's hardly vintage -- old French wine in old bottles.

"The Grand Highway" is unrated but contains some adult material.