A Nos Amours

A French film set in Paris. Suzanne is fifteen. She is acting in a play at a summer camp and that night she is with a boy. Things are tense at home. Her father is a furrier, her mother cries constantly, and her brother hits her. Suzanne goes about outside. She sleeps with men and does it not as a search but as a habit. Her boyfriend Luc loves her. She leaves him and does not know why herself. From there the film is a story of coming apart. Home, the street, hotel rooms, a holiday, a marriage and an escape. One day the father leaves. He walks out of the house and the mother and two children are left. Everything gets worse when he goes. The mother collapses, the brother starts behaving as head of the house, and the violence increases. What the narrative is interested in is not sex but the absence of love: Suzanne says it herself in one scene; she explains that she no longer feels anything, and the film leaves that as a diagnosis. The dinner is the film's best known scene. The father returns unexpectedly and takes on everyone at the table one by one. That scene has a story. Maurice Pialat plays the father himself and walks into the scene without telling the cast; the shock at the table is not acting. Sandrine Bonnaire entered cinema with this film and was fifteen during the shoot. Some of the dialogue is improvised. The narrative prefers shooting scenes without rehearsal and the cuts are hard. The film was named Best Film at France's national cinema awards and Bonnaire won for most promising actress. Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Dominique Besnehard and Evelyne Ker are in the cast. Maurice Pialat directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes realist French family drama and improvised acting. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure; the narrative moves scene by scene, the jumps in time are unmarked, and the violent scenes are genuinely hard.