The plot follows the romantic and sexual awakening of two seventeen-year-old boys as their initial animosity, expressed in violence, morphs into love.
Being 17 borrows its title from the second half-line of the first verse of Roman, (1870) by Arthur Rimbaud: On n'est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans.
In order to protect himself, Damien takes self-defense classes with Paulo, an ex-military family friend.
Meanwhile, Thomas, who is the biracial adopted son of a couple of sheep and cattle farmers, faces his own set of problems.
As the reserved Thomas worries about his mother and the birth of a biological child to his parents, his grades in school begin to fail.
Wanting to help, Marianne invites Thomas to come and stay with her family so he can visit his mother in town at the hospital and spend more time studying and avoid the long trip to school every day.
Nathan is lovingly welcomed by his wife and son and takes it upon himself, during his short visit, to personally invite Thomas to stay with his family.
Several days later, Damien asks a reluctant Thomas to drive to see a man whom he has contacted online for a sexual experiment.
For his 21st feature film, director André Téchiné returned to the theme of adolescent life more than twenty years after his success with Wild Reeds (1994).
The script was written by Téchiné in collaboration with Céline Sciamma, director of three coming-of-age films: Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014).
Shooting took place in around Bagnères-de-Luchon encompassing two different periods: a winter session, wrapped on 13 February 2015, and several weeks in the summer (from 25 June-31 July 2015).
Téchiné choose to set the story in Southwest France in the Hautes-Pyrénées, with its mountainous landscapes, a region of the country rarely depicted in films.
"[8] In the Los Angeles Times Justin Chang commented, " Being 17 unfolds over the course of a year divided into three chapters, or "trimesters," as they're labeled on screen.
It's a reference to the term schedule of the French school system, but also to the new life developing in Christine's womb — a fitting choice for a movie that plays, by the end, like the work of an artist newly born".
The project of Being 17, which is realized via the accretion of dozens of wonderful details, is to prove that assertion entirely wrong, to celebrate desire as the most natural and necessary thing in our lives".
[10] Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney called the film "quite extraordinary ... an ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.