She hadn’t come to the beach for the sun. She had come, ostensibly, to escape the city, but the moment she arrived at the rented cottage, the lack of structure began to claw at her. Marion was busy dissecting her love life with a local windsurfing instructor, and Pauline, ever the pragmatist, found herself seeking a different kind of order.

There is a specific, almost unbearable ache that comes with watching an Éric Rohmer film in the middle of a hyper-digital summer. The kind of summer where your phone buzzes with notifications every thirty seconds. The kind where "talking" has been replaced by sliding into DMs. And then, like a seashell washed ashore, you find Pauline at the Beach ( Pauline à la plage ) sitting patiently on the .