À nos amours (To Our Loves) is a 1983 French film directed by Maurice Pialat, written by Arlette Langmann and Pialat.The film is a character study focusing on Suzanne, a promiscuous fifteen-year-old Parisian, played by Sandrine Bonnaire. Despite her age, Suzanne engages in a number of affairs in reaction to her miserable situation at home.but let me discuss now my personal opinion:Maurice Pialat's films aren't made to be liked, petted, praised, or held up as shining examples of anything. It's said that the director, a chronic malcontent by most accounts, considered himself or aspired to be a “popular filmmaker.” I don't buy it, and I can't convince myself that he did either—there's so little in his movies that openly petitions for sympathy or shows the discreet condescension that audiences have been taught to expect. Most movies, when they require the audience to read through a letter or some odd piece of exposition, keep it on-screen long enough for anyone with a first-grade reading level to slog through; Pialat’s films—cracked-up, groove-skipping things—will drop the letter entirely. Keep pace or shut up, they imply.I can't imagine this director respecting an adoring public on the occasion that he found one, as with À nos amours, a box-office success that shared the 1984 Best Picture Cèsar with Ettore Scola's Le bal. Most of his plots seem to rely on the difficulty (the impossibility?) of reciprocal love, on pain as the intrinsic by-product of every human exchange, almost as a natural law. “Hell is other people”—it's one of Pialat's greatest preoccupations, and it’s one of the great themes—Fassbinder was likewise drawn to it, and must've recognized some kindred purpose in Pialat; it's his 1973 We Will Not Grow Old Together that's prominently channel-surfed through in Fassbinder's emotional charnel house In a Year of 13 Moons. Is there any more pressing topic, which has quietly, privately crushed more lives than all the wars and holocausts of history?
The film gives the feeling of something less strategized than cobbled together from odd objets trouvés shots, a patchwork of meandering pans that come a moment after you'd expect them, two-shots, some raucous dollies… On-set improvisation and invention are key to the liveliness in Pialat's work, but even on-the-move, his actors never forget qualities like hesitation, reserve, and embarrassment, distinguishing him from the “dueling blowhard” school of loquacious American film improve—from Faces clean through 25th Hour—in which actors try to out-gab each other as though they're getting paid by the line (maybe it’s a New York thing…). Still, watching the domestic melee of À nos amours leaves the impression of a lacerating shoot. Almost every family squabble elevates into a tactically real smackdown; at one point, when Ker cracks her head on a wall's moulding, a trickle of very real blood emerges under her hairline. Pialat's movies are testy, thrashing—one gets the sense, through his surrogate egos, that the man rebelled at quietude; the films reflect a compulsion to hurtle bodily toward the threat of tranquility.
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