The word “particular” made me wonder. In the elite English boarding school world, a “particular friendship” was a disapproving euphemism for a sexual relationship between two boys.

But they probably took the word particular from the French, who also used it to refer to and disapprove of adolescent same-sex romances in school. The film in question was a daring French New Wave exploration of the topic, from the sympathetic perspective of a boy in such a relationship in a Catholic boarding school.