À Nos Amours [1983]

In A Nos Amours Pialat used a rigorous style, penetrating focus and unsentimental approach to brilliantly examine the hormonal coming-of-age of a teenager in the face of reactionary attitudes of the conventional to matters related to the libido, and further compounded by a family that is becoming more and more dysfunctional by the day. It was a warm but bleak film, with only a few flashes of contentedness or exuberance, that stressed on the importance of physically breaking free of familial, and in turn class shackles and impositions in order to truly be free. It also covered the dilemmas between the emotional and physical love, challenging the apparent inseparability of the two. Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) is an emotionally cold 15 year old girl whose uninhibitedness and promiscuity, and in particular her amoral attitude towards it, earns the discomfiture of her father (played by Pialat himself), and the wrath of her prudish, volatile and increasingly neurotic mother (Evelyne Ker) and brutish brother (Dominique Besnehard). The fact that his father, too, is emotionally barren like her – the father-daughter chats were most illuminating in this regards, while her hypocrite of a brother might be subliminally harbouring attractions towards her, might just be exacerbating their guilty consciences; as for the mother, its puritanical middle-class morality and orthodoxy at play. Meanwhile, clueless of what she wants, she moves from one guy to another in her futile and fragile quest for love. Bonnaire, who was only 15 years old herself, gave a memorable and surprisingly matured turn that called upon displays of sensuality, vulnerability and a volley of barely suppressed emotions.

Director: Maurice Pialat
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Coming-of-Age
Language: French
Country: France