Nouchka van Brakel depicts "impossible love" with sensitivity in THE DEBUT, on Blu-ray from Cult Epics.

The younger daughter of gynecologist Peter (Dolf de Vries, THE FOURTH MAN) and housewife mother Anne (Kitty Courbois, SPETTERS), fourteen-year-old Carolien Saunders (Marina de Graaf, ANTONIA'S LINE) is such a rabble rouser that even her classmates think she's immature since she thinks boys her age are losers and prefers to needle them rather than flirt like her best friend Tanja (Sandrien van Brakel); that is, until her parents' college friends Hugo (Gerard Cox, THOSE WERE THE DAYS) and Rita (Pleuni Touw, BLACK RIDER) return to Holland after living for seven years in Zambia. As Rita throws herself into looking for a new apartment – the length of their return home as yet ambiguous with the possibility of returning to Africa in spite of Rita's crying fits of homesickness – Hugo seems to be the only person in Carolien's life amused by her unconventional behavior. While Carolien claims to be staying over at Tanja's house and Hugo goes on lengthy strolls at night, they consummate an affair based upon secrecy and intrigue that is shaken to its core when Rita announces that she is pregnant. Carolien's outbursts of anger and emotion are attributed to her age, but Hugo starts to become jealous when Carolien seeks attention from her own age group.

Based upon the novel by Hester Albach, THE DEBUT was indeed Dutch female director Nouchka van Brakel's feature-length film debut, and she not only eschews LOLITA clichés as those of the then in vogue softcore sexploitation subgenre dealing with the sex lives of teenagers a la SCHOOLGIRL REPORT while simultaneously couching the lives of the characters in some of the same social and cultural realities. The girls' schoolteacher almost loses his job when he directs Carolien and Tanja in a Christmas pageant performance as two angels pregnant through immaculate conception as a means of decrying the conservative position on the abortion debate, Peter and Anne take different sides in a heated argument when Carolien wants to go on the pill – with Peter citing the indiscretions of their single mother elder daughter Suzan (Wendy Ferwerda) who otherwise seems favored by them – and jealous Tanja's spreading rumors about her friend's affair with an older man has the boys in the class suddenly seeing Carolien as more experienced including Tanja's boyfriend Jacques (Pieter Fleury) who rapes her. Although the story is told from Carolien's perspective, Braken etches Hugo in a subtler way but refuses to portray him as a creep even when he becomes jealous and possessive; as such, the ending is low key and bittersweet rather than melodramatic, seeming true to experience rather than a cop-out.