When filmmaker Maurice Pialat decided to keep an eye on French teenagers in the eighties while they were at home (from where they always snuck out with a good excuse) and at school (where they didn’t really even go to anymore), the result was the most powerful film ever made about the mythical “teen spirit”. „À nos amours” is now available online, as part of My French Film Festival, and streaming on MUBI.

À nos amours discusses the period when the bird flies off from its nest, gripped by the hormones of adolescence. A premise as natural as can be – everyone has been there, after all –, but for someone like Pialat, it proves itself problematic from the get-go. Is it surprising? Not quite, since the filmmaker’s unwritten axiom is quite famous: that the simplicity of a premise – like that of a family life moving forward implacably – must necessarily lead to struggles, fights and regrets that are enormous in size. They say that Pialat thought that only one topic was worth being shot: that of broken bonds. The well-known trouble – since this is the biggest filmmaker of familiar violence, after all – is that this implies throwing one’s skin in the game. And À nos amours takes this assertion to its ultimate conclusions. As one could already see in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), another one of the auteur’s paroxysmal films, this love-turned-hate relationship burned down everything in its path, except – damn it! – itself. But here, in his 1983 film, the bonds are made of blood, and the situation is – to paraphrase Watzlawick – hopeless, but still not grave: Pialat understands all too well that one cannot choose their own parents, but that doesn’t prevent his characters from rebelling al the way – and in vain – against their destinies. 

To (re)watch À nos amours is a stirring experience: a toxic cocktail left to settle in vain, the film gives a foggy feeling, and with its well-known vigor, it ridicules the “radiographs” of modern rebel kids with the insolence of a punk kid that’s already smoked all the things that he could’ve smoked. The topic is not inasmuch that of the family (it is, to a certain extent), as it is that of a study in the nuances of skin (Pialat started off as a painter): bodies without clothes, draped in sheets and other such objects. The semantics of the word “love”, in other words: love and sex, and not necessarily in this order.

Cruel and melancholy to the same extent, the film is contained in this clash between Maurice Pialat’s saddened smile and Sandrine Bonnaire’s roguish grin, a father and daughter who pass the proverbial baton to each other, à contrecœur (obligatory). It’s as if Pialat the actor couldn’t be bothered to leave the scene: much too narcissistic in his clarity, he needs even the temporary close-up of the camera. And this is where his sensation of kind envy towards his own child arises from – the guilty sadness at the thought that she has her whole life ahead to ruin herself. And this is also where the irresistible complicity between the two also arises from.

Just rewatch the following sequence, because it is truly the work of genius. A father and her daughter are sitting at the dinner table in the middle of the night, illuminated by a weak light. The girl is eating a slice of ham and licks her fingers in a lascivious gesture. The father calmly announces to her that he is leaving the home and is leaving everything – her, her brother, and their mother. “What do you care?”, the man lobs at her, without hostility. “You’re my father after all, right?”, the daughter replies, as if she were a physicist. The entire gamut of this cinema – the rigor of spontaneity – passes through these shots: characters regarding other characters as they struggle to fully exist. From the girl’s sexualized pose to the materiality of a banal moment charged by invisible energies, the blend is electric, pure and simple. 

A choleric character like Pialat pulls off scenes of calmness so well because they’re rarer than sunny days in Ireland, they’re always shrouded in the dark steams of exchanges that are fully angry and psychotic.

In his wonderful review, Serge Daney was the first to figure out what Pialat does here in terms that are atmospherically charged:

For films that, just like À nos amours, are extra, that nobody else can shoot but their author, that results from a battle with the material that is cinema, one must very quickly invent the metaphors from outside of the realm of cinema, which one needs in order to describe them. And this time, we will regard Pialat from the angle of depression, of disturbance, of high and low pressures. In short, the angle of meteorology.

Besides, the closeness of this cinema like an unfolding cyclone is a much more complicated affair than its simple device is willing to reveal: it asks of the film’s creators – of its actors, of Pialat the scriptwriter – a sans faute across all lines of convention. For it to be realistic, to put it in other words, but like here – meaning, one that is capable of offering an ecstatic concept of the cinematic profession.

This is what it is all about, in fact: in its exigence, À nos amours wages a battle in the name of an anti-formalism of sorts, of an absolute refusal of tricks, which it replaces with a dense, sludgy substance which is the prime matter of the painfully full lives that surround us. The enemy of this cinema of grotesque surges and contacts is not Bresson, but rather, a gleeful offering like Jules et Jim. There are no traces of frivolousness here –  even Suzanne’s constant and heartbreaking flirtation is treated in the most serious way imaginable, as a sovereign matter for cinema. It’s the smallest sacrifice that Pialat the creator can make to touch the heel of his libertine, perverse fantasy. Between the male gaze and the high seas, Sandrine Bonnaire is the nebulous light source of each and every shot, voluptuously set into motion by Pialat himself, from his position as an obsessive demi-god. Incapable of working in any other way than by facing adversity, Pialat corners his prey and tells himself to stop only after he has overstepped the line.

It might just be that the father is the first and ultimate love of the daughter: the director cum actor is careful to keep this role aside for himself, only to destroy a seemingly calm evening (in the film’s memorable second-to-last scene) with gusto. Explosion after explosion, À nos amours will end up transforming into a ravaged landscape, ravishing in its wild beauty. 

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.