 "Special friendships" are youthful relationships with homoerotic overtones, and this film explores them in the setting of a strict French Roman Catholic boys  boarding school in the 1920s. The faculty are ever alert, depriving the students of all privacy. When a vulnerable fifteen-year old boy, motivated variously by jealousy, subservience and fear, or genuine good intentions, co-operates with his teachers  campaigns to repress all suggestion of romance or impropriety in his own and others  friendships, he betrays everyone most important to him. Based on the novel "Les Amities Particulieres" by Roger Peyrefitte.