To judge from the interviews included with the hefty Criterion release of Ă nos amours, director Maurice Pialat is practically worshipped in France. I'll be honest: I'd never heard of the guy. An iconoclast frequently compared with Cassavetes, Pialat is also, apparently, a favorite of that connoisseur of sordid naivetĂ©, Catherine Breillat (Une Vraie Jeune Fille, Fat Girl). It's a good combination to keep in mindâthe haywire delicacy of captured improvisations, plus the narcissism that always seems to lurk behind any obsession with teenage sexuality. Is Ă nos amours prurient, or nostalgic? Are the scenes it depicts stickily immediate, like the best veritĂ© films, or do they flicker with reverence for youth, like the most perfect products of the French New Wave?
The first few minutes of Pialat's 1983 film are gloriously in between. There's a strong resemblance to the sexy opening scenes of a Breillat filmâyou know, before earthworms or menstrual blood get involved. Sandrine Bonnaire is Suzanne, a 15-year-old too young to play the vixen, too sturdy to claim the rarefied title of nymphet. With her square jaw, protuberant nose, deep-set eyes, and one-sided dimple, she is awesomely weird looking, despite her magnificent body.
When we first see her at summer camp, Suzanne is rehearsing a scene in Alfred de Musset's 19th-century drama Don't Play with Love. Badly. In a TV interview included in the supplements, Pialat complains about the usual style of acting for the camera, in which every facial expression is tuned down almost past the point of perceptibility. Suzanne, usually vibrant, is so turgid in her on-stage role that at first you don't recognize the heavy irony in the Romantic dialogue. But it's funnyâa play that would have been excruciating in person becomes completely hilarious when cut to ribbons and artfully edited around one perfect whump of an off-stage swoon.
Enough with the theaterâlike any post-Truffaut adolescent, Suzanne has better things to do. Her brother stops by the camp to take her out on a boat, and we get to see her lurking around the prow as the mock operatics of a Klaus Nomi song portend the off-kilter drama to come. She wears a white dress. Wind whips the skirt up around her butt, coyly revealing a favorite Pialat shotâthe back of her upper thighs. Eventually Suzanne turns to face the camera. She smiles. And... apotheosis.
The rest of the film details Suzanne's restless sexual adventures with various interchangeable guys, and her increasingly tense relationship with her father, played very well by Pialat. The only boy she won't sleep with is, of course, her first love, a rock 'n' roll baby named Lucâwhen she leaves him in a golden field by the side of a highway, a buzzy chorus of cicadas signals the undissipated tension. It's a typical story, shot through with veritĂ© shocks and plenty of domestic violence. Ă nos amours may not add up to much in the end, but what an electrifying entrĂ©e.
