The First Time I Turned Twenty

The action takes place in the early 1960s in the Paris suburbs. Hannah Goldman (Marilou Berry), sixteen and Jewish, has two very pretty sisters and parents who love her. But she is not happy, feeling herself ugly due to being overweight, and she deeply nourishes a terrible complex at the beauty of her sisters and that of her school friend. But Hannah has two great qualities her sisters admit to both not possessing and envying: she's smart, and she has a talent for music.

Wishing to make a career in music, she chooses an instrument that looks like her ... the double bass, an instrument that is traditionally viewed as a "male instrument". But her musical nonconformity does not stop there: she dreams of entering the jazz band at her high school. This year the jazz band needs a new bassist. But there have never been any women in the jazz band, established now for many years by the high school music teacher, and in addition, this instrument's position is traditionally held by a man, and for a woman to claim this instrument in training deeply shocks all the high school boys.

Or in the selection contest it performs a benefit much higher than that of the only other competitor. She wins the selection competition, to the delight of her family. But her four musician comrades, viscerally misogynist, very attached to the male tradition of their training, and also singularly lacking all subtlety as any courtesy, will try everything to discourage it. Beginning immediately by reminding her that she is a woman, and that they do not want a woman in their training, they harass her in order to gradually undermine her morale. They go one evening to plot a sinister Nazi symbol on her scores played during a concert, and what is even worse in her eyes ... they try to humiliate her by attacking her instrument.

Struggling against the discouragement month after month and use all her intelligence and patience, stimulated by her uncle, she will eventually win the admiration of part of the group of four boys.

• Marilou Berry as Hannah Goldman
• Catherine Jacob as Madame Goldman
• Serge Riaboukine as Meyer Goldman
• Pierre Arditi as Uncle Jérémy
• Nathalie Courval as Aunt Lucie
• Myriam Moraly as Judith
• Stéphanie Pasterkamp as Sandra
• Raphaël Personnaz as Louis
• Michel Vuillermoz as M. Conrad
• Laurent Spielvogel as M. Troutman
• Catherine Arditi as Madame Sarah
• Adrien Jolivet as David
• Guillaume Destrem as Jérémy's lover
• Romain Vissol as Jo
• Didier Becchetti as Jip
• Sophie Guiter as Mlle Appelbaum
• Erwan Demaure as Denis
• Renan Mazéas as Emile
• Joséphine Serre as Myriam
• Maroussia Dubreuil as Ruth
• Louis Descols as Robert
• Stéphane Rugraff as Jean-Jean

• The First Time I Turned Twenty at IMDb