Further evidence that the camera can eroticize virtually anything in its frame, Come Undone makes a paradise found (and lost) out of a none-too-elegant French seaside town, turning carnival rides, cotton candy, and chilly beaches into the stuff of a lovers' idyll. An ostensibly straight 18-year-old on an annual vacation with his family, Jérémie Elkaïm and a been-around local boy (Stéphane Rideau) strike up a flirtation that quickly turns serious. Flashing forward, director Sébastien Lifshitz occasionally pauses from the romance to reveal that, by winter, something has gone wrong enough to send Elkaïm into the hospital after a suicide attempt. Has his coming-out been received poorly? Has Rideau revealed more of the rough side his early behavior suggested? Lifshitz leaves the blanks unfilled for much of Come Undone, letting Elkaïm and Rideau's relationship drift languidly along its course from nights at the local disco to uncomfortable family dinners with Elkaïm's mysteriously ill mother to sex on the beach. In its best moments, the film gets caught up in the lovers' state of mind, and for long passages, Lifshitz makes their summer look like heaven on Earth. In other segments, the director reveals a similar command of atmosphere and tone. But although his actors do their part, he has a hard time seeing his characters as anything other than pretty objects. Elkaïm's later distress feels particularly superimposed, more like an inevitable byproduct of the beautifully captured changing seasons than the result of forces within his character. While Come Undone as a whole doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny, Lifshitz's command of atmosphere almost lets him get by on his ability to summon tone poems out of the raw material of everyday life. With such a powerful skill, he seems destined to someday make a film as memorable as his locations.