L'herbier is less forward visually here than in L'argent the next year, less about motion in the eye and more about knots of tangled fate. It's melodrama in a small coastal town about a fisherman's daughter who falls for an orphaned boy she has taken in their house.
But if you look, the main device that gives the story shape is dreamlike, in tune with French notions of the time about eyeing turbulent soul and how this mode would resurface years later in the next great French school of Rivette and Resnais.
So a girl who is boisterous and careless, we see her running with a coterie of boys around town happy to cause mischief. He is the exact opposite, serious and dutiful about helping out his fisherman father. Her disdain for that life of responsibility is summoned early when she breaks a window in their house and the boy slaps her. Spiteful, the girl wishes they die.
The karmic chain in motion is a tempest out at sea the next day that shatters lives and breaks up his home.
This is followed by the most dreamlike scene where she lays down outside a church, drifts to sleep and in the next beat the boy has been summoned back to her; salvaged from the wreck that morning and has come to pray. In essence we have layered dreaming about a girl who takes him in and comes to find out about love and responsibility. Other dreamlike digress: inside a club where she finds him cavorting with dancers as what she fears, her parents happily acceding to marriage as what she hopes for.
We have less interesting stretches about a lecherous clubowner who plots to win her over with money and much dismay as she must rush to claim her own fate before it's decided for her. It happens out at sea with turbulent waters; once more someone is left behind and he comes to her.
So we have clean language and melodramatic plot, ordinary for the time, the way it's structured though so that we receive dramas of love along with the mind that creates internal currents of them is forward- looking. This is the language Celine and Julie would be written in, one of the very best.