"Claudine," far from being "tender, revealing and gay" is the fitful stepchild of a distorted imagination. The bracing earthiness of French humor is gone, the edge of satire dulled, the atmosphere laden down with cloyingly pastoral photography.

Attending a girls' boarding school, Claudine is obsessed by a jealously possessive love for one of her women teachers. At the most trivial provocation she flings herself from hysterical joy into psychopathic outbursts of grief. That these are the natural symptons of budding love, is pounded into the wincing spectator with morbid persistence.

Add to this Freudian potpourri a father in love with snails, and scores of definitely unattractive adolescents in heavy shoes and long dresses showing figures at their worst, and you have "sweet sixteen, youth smiling through its tears"--while the onlooker bites his fingernails in depressed frustration.

If you can see the exquisite travel film of Roquefort in southeastern France after "Claudine," you will welcome it as a refreshing antidote.