You may be aware of these characters from the book by La Comtesse de Ségur, but this is a rather different adaptation, where the good little girls are older than they were in the text, although you should recognise Mme de Fleurville (Michèle Girardon) and her two teenage daughters, Madeleine (Jessica Dorn) and Camille (Marie-Georges Pascal) who she was bringing up on her own as a widow. Her wealthy husband had left her a mansion house in the country to live in, but there wasn't much to do out there in the rural area where they spent their days...
Of course, you may well not be aware of the book at all, depending on whether you were a reader of French, and even more depending on whether you were a reader of French eighteenth century literature, because if you were not the joke here would most likely be utterly lost on you, even if the film does open with scene-setting showing that old cliché of the book being opened and the plot introduced in voiceover. That narration continued throughout in a sophisticated yet sexually allusive manner, which was not such a bad way of describing the overall tone of the rest of the production.
So what you had here was one of those occasional saucy efforts which took a much loved classic, or at least this was in France, and sexed it up. That type of thing became more common in the era of hardcore porn spoofs, adapting whatever hit movie of the day they could think of for lucrative methods and leaving nobody but fans of punning titles truly satisfied, but few would be watching those to note down the references to their targets and calling out a hearty "bravo!" at each fresh connection they could fathom. With this, you got the impression that was precisely what writer and director Jean-Claude Roy wanted viewers to do.
Naturally, this made for a work which didn't travel too well, especially when the point of the jokes was too obscure even for those in France who had not read the original. But if your tastes extended to wholesome frolics in the altogether out in the countryside, then you might have found something to divert you here - well, almost, because there were a couple of aspects that were somewhat darker than that. There's a car crash in the first ten minutes where Mme de Fleuville takes the two injured parties to her bosom, a daughter Marguerite (Cathy Reghin) and her mother, so that's three girls and now we needed our fourth.
She was Sophie (Sylvie Lafontaine), and an odd individual she was, having been beaten by her wicked stepmother but actually gotten so used to it that she enjoys the crack of the riding crop against her skin. When Mme de Fleuville takes her under her wing, Sophie proves difficult and a troublemaker, though when punished by forbidding any beatings she begins to calm down a bit (not enough to stop her pretending to drown so she'll get the mouth to mouth treatment, however). Various other anecdotes populate the film, but to call it slight would be no understatement as it parodied the upper classes inasmuch as is depicted them as randy and with too much time on their hands, a combination which left you in little doubt as to how they would solve that problem of recreation. There were a few digs at trendies for variety, but mostly Good Little Girls was a relic of softcore satire, not a genre that went from strength to strength. Groovy music by Maurice Lecoeur.
