A Fiery Tale of Teenage Despair, as Fresh as When It Debuted in 1994

NEW YORK — “Cold Water,” Olivier Assayas’ paean to adolescent desperation, is as bracing as its title suggests. Screened at the New York Film Festival in 1994, it introduced American audiences to a promising talent who became one of France’s leading filmmakers. Despite positive reviews, “Cold Water” was never commercially released in the United States in part because of difficulty in clearing the rights to material sung by Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and others.

Those issues have been resolved, and now “Cold Water” is opening Friday at the IFC Center in a new 4K restoration.

Set in 1972, the film centers on the 16-year-old high school classmates and outlaw sweethearts, Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet). Their crimes — shoplifting, playing hooky, smoking pot — may be quotidian, but their alienation is not. While the more literary Gilles acts out by dissing his self-important French teacher and taking to the woods to declaim Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Christine, whose troubled home life is made evident, appears willfully self-destructive.

“Unusual, disjointed framing and edgy camera work help crystallize the feeling that the young lovers’ lives are going dangerously askew,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review.

Nodding to François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” “Cold Water” is a self-aware descendant of the French New Wave. Like Truffaut and Godard, Assayas turned from critic to filmmaker after a stint with Cahiers du Cinéma; the French-Hungarian actor Laszlo Szabo, a frequent supporting player in New Wave films, has a scene here as Gilles’ father. But “Cold Water,” which Assayas has characterized in some ways as being autobiographical, is even more forcefully a post-New Wave generational statement.

The movie’s set piece is a gathering — too small to be a rave but too heedless and chaotic to be called a party — held on the grounds of an abandoned château. Christine is already there, having escaped from the mental institution where she had been hospitalized by her father. Ledoyen, herself a teenager when the movie was made, gives Christine a facade of burnished, if brittle, bravado; her fleeting expression of joyous gratitude when Gilles turns up could break your heart.

As his camera prowls among the revelers, their faces illuminated by trash-can fires, Assayas demonstrates his skill as a DJ, switching back and forth between anarchic ecstasy (“School’s Out,” “Up Around the Bend”) and the voluptuously elegiac (“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Avalanche”). The sequence is a tour de force of flaming youth. But it’s a cold morning after at the end of the road.

Assayas succeeded in making a young person’s film when he was on the cusp of turning 40. He has said that he wanted “Cold Water” to feel like a movie from 1972. It doesn’t really, but, perhaps more remarkably, it’s so fresh it could have been made now.

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‘Cold Water’

IFC Center, New York; 212-924-7771; ifccenter.com.