Inspired by real events, Jean-Pierre Améris' astonishing Bad Company follows a teenage girl's precipitous drop from innocence to shocking debasement, careening forward with both reckless acceleration and dreadful, immutable logic. A classic example of French l'amour fou ("mad love"), the story achieves a special potency just by virtue of being about adolescents, with their dangerous mix of inexperience, idealism, self-absorption, and emotional volatility. What begins as a deceptively cliched movie-of-the-week about a sweet middle-class girl falling in with the wrong crowd quickly transforms into something more unexpected and powerful. Still into bubblegum pop and pigtails, the not-quite 15-year-old Maud Forget looks conspicuously younger than the rest of her class, so short and timid and unadorned that she sinks into the wallpaper. On the first day of school, she's transfixed by Lou Doillon, a new student who's her opposite in every way: punkish, dreadlocked, provocatively dressed, and nearly a foot taller. The two become fast friends and soon the more experienced Doillon initiates Forget into the Paris club scene, where she meets and falls in love with Robinson Stévenin, a brooding bad boy with dreams of living in Kingston, Jamaica, home of his idol Bob Marley. But just when Bad Company looks like a typical coming-of-age story, with Doillon corrupting the naive Forget, a startlingly cruel twist reverses their roles and sends them both spiraling into degradation. Forget's willful self-sacrifice in the name of love, made all the more tragic by its indifferent reception, has a lot in common with Emily Watson's journey in Breaking The Waves; even at their lowest point, they're redeemed by a purity of feeling and intent. But whereas Watson's innocence is unusually pious and saintly, Forget's is common to anyone experiencing the intensity of first love, only her vulnerability meets with particularly dire consequences. Améris handles the potentially lurid material with admirable sensitivity, not just in his refusal to wallow in the muck, but also in his attention to the inner lives of all the characters, even a scoundrel like Stévenin. A wrenching and acutely observed coming-of-age tale, Bad Company gets its power from the heightened emotions of ordinary adolescence, and shows how far they lead a pure-hearted teenager astray.