A Nos Amours (1985)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

A perfect example which illustrates why being truth to life sometimes doesn't often equal great movies. Maurice Pialat wasn't completely truthful in its depiction of youth's shallowness but he isn't completely off mark, just a few objectionable things that look bizarre, too exploitative or unbelievable. But that's life sometimes. "À Nos Amours" ("To Our Loves") focus is a teenage girl (Sandrine Bonnaire) and the way she conducts her sexual relationships, first with a boyfriend, the good hearted Luc (Cyr Boitard), and later evolves to sometimes mindless, sometimes affectionate casual encounters with other guys. Almost fine if it wasn't for her family bothering with this, and a somewhat unpredictable disintegration when her father (Pialat) decides to leave the family. What spirals after that is an emotional roller-coaster with the infatuated girl being a victim of constant reprehension and beatings from her older brother, now head of the family, and the mother who seems to be rotting away into madness, not knowing how to cope with everything happening around her. And there's plenty of time for her dedicate some time with her lovers, miserable for not getting the love she deserves. One goes through this with plenty of expectations and interest but one walks out with plenty of reservations and little gain. C'mon, this was made in 1980's and you're telling me that even back then, in such a bourgeoisie family, allegedly cultured, they treat the typical adolescent behavior in that horrid way? With punches, yells and stuff? I would expect this in a poorer background. Everything's so over-the-top, so forced, very off-putting. The movie seems to suggest that there's something going on between father and daughter and also between brother and sister, just suggest some incestuous relations but never goes into that deep. What Pialat captured with some excellency was youth's boredom, trying everything to escape from the usual routine of schools, classmates, and dealing with parents; youth's incapacity to love or find love, or using such as something to pass the time, not knowing what love truly means, going from one relationship to another, desperate to find something new that may cure them from their boredom and apathy towards life. This is clearly evidenced in the scene where the girl has an one night stand with an English sailor. She had her fun, experienced something great but she doesn't show much after the fact, a little worried because she cheated on her boyfriend. It isn't a first rate portrayal, obviously, but it's far more realistic than the other topics already mentioned (the family matters). The movie strangely went absurd towards the ending, giving unexplainable solutions and the strange return of the father.I enjoyed this movie, enjoyed its good pace, it makes you interested with the very few it has to share. A little saddening that it wasn't all that much of a good film as a Cesar Award winner should be. Bonnaire, in one of her earliest roles, has plenty of qualities despite the relative lack of expression her character has, constantly down, sad, beaten. Far from being the great French cinema but beautiful to look at. 6/10

Well, the movie got one thing right anyway. Sandrine Bonnaire is the essence of sixteen-year-old nubility and it comes in a delightful frame. Don't worry too much, though. There's very little nudity and no simulated sex. She can act too. Once in a while she grins. But her default expression is one of solemn and distant contempt. It happens to fit the role because she's not supposed to be a happy adolescent, despite her middle-class family.Sandrine lives at home with her father, her mother, and her possibly gender-confused, plump older brother. Her father, in this context, is the soul of common sense and tranquility. He's played by the director, Maurice Pialat, who had the good taste to give himself the good-guy role. Sandrine's mother, on the other hand, although she tries to live up to her responsibilities, is a whirlwind of hysteria with a waspish temper. She treat Sandrine the way my concierge treated me. She and Sandrine bat each other around -- really HARD, too, so you can hear the loud whacks as the blows land. When Mom isn't beating Sandrine, the brother is.I want to give the film points for its elegant dinner conversation with guests present. They argue over who's the better artist and fling around names like Ingre and Bonnard. And they're entirely serious except when making up portmanteau words like "Picasshole." Well, that's the French for you. In a fancy restaurant in Paris there was a ruckus at the next table and one of the staff came over and apologized to us, explaining that the waiter was a Cartesian.And how does Sandrine handle all this strife? Not well. She's really just a dependent kid, after all. She balls every boy who shows an interest in her, even if the kid can't speak French and, after intercourse, says, "Thanks a lot." With Sandrine's absent father and her mother the paragon of instability that she is, it's understandable that Sandrine's reaction is less than what Freud called "anaclitic." Sandrine isn't interested in older men, just horny high-school boys. And her musings sound like those of Henri, the existential cat. "It's terrible to love no one," and, "Sometimes it feels as if my heart has dried up."What eluded me was the point of the movie. Is it that married couples who have been together for twenty years find that they don't have much to say to one another, and so they argue a lot? Is it that teens who are striving for an identity outside of the household run into trouble with their mothers who demand that they obey orders as if they were still toddlers? Is it that, even outside the household, teens have trouble deciding who they are and what they want because they don't have enough experience to decide? Well, knock me down with a banal feather! I can tell you it wasn't that way when I struggled through high school. Oh, it was tough, sure, but there weren't any girls around who were as accommodating as Sandrine. You couldn't even get close to the plain-looking girls, let alone the devastating beauties. And these young punks take their access to her body for granted? I don't like those boys. Come to think of it, I don't like this movie because it has such lucky goons IN it. These kids are spoiled rotten. They don't have to put the least effort into what I yearned for, the swine. I ask you -- the sensitive and discerning viewer -- is it any wonder that the world is going to hell in a handbasket?

A Nos Amours is the story of Suzanne, a promiscuous young girl with a troubled home life. In spite of their wealth, her family is very dysfunctional and pretty much every one of them (Suzanne, her brother, and her two parents) hits every other one at some point in the movie but the abuse they dish out is verbal just as often as it is physical. As a result, Suzanne is already in the early stages of being a slut by the time she is sixteen. As the film begins she has been dating a young man who really seems to care about her but she is unwilling to share any type of intimacy with him. It isn't long before we see Suzanne having sex with strangers or casual acquaintances who are less likely to want a real emotional bond with her and hence pose less of a threat to her fragile mental state.Pialat's style in this film could be defined as minimalist but he still covers a pretty big stretch of Suzanne's life. The film's very loose chronology is completely linear but different amounts of time take place between each scene. Early on it seems that the entire film will take place over one year of Suzanne's life but before long there are entire months or years between scenes. Some major events happen but none of them are really explored with any depth. For me this is the film's major flaw: since major plot events (and there are many) are briefly shown or only hinted at we can't see how each character reacts and the film is robbed of all dramatic impact. Once I realized that the film was inherently undramatic I began to expect some sort of character based movie but Pialat completely fails at creating three dimensional characters. I suppose the idea here must have been to keep it universal and make some sort of statement about the impossibility of people to connect to each other even when they have the most reason to do so. This message comes off as trite at best and misanthropic at worst. I suppose the misery porn crowd that digs melodrama and cynicism will be likely to enjoy this film but I imagine they'll be the only ones.

A fairly maddening French teen angst movie here, featuring one of the more bordering-on-hysterics performances I've seen in a long time.Sandrinne Bonnairre stars as a unsettled teenager growing up in France. She doesn't really pay attention to no one's advice about what to do in her life, sleeps with countless men, and gets into endless fights at home. She is a sad soul trying to make heads or tails about the men in her life, while her Mom and Brother just want her to concentrate on her studies.I wasn't too crazy about this film, sometimes boring, sometimes confusing. But Bonnairre is fantastic here, really getting into her character: Screaming, swearing and fighting her way through everyone. Mind you, they dish it out (and do they ever) on her as well.So, good performance, so so movie.