"À nos amours" (1983)

À nos amours starts out innocuously enough, with a resplendent, sixteen-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire memorizing and reciting the lines of a play about love. (I forget its title, and the lines.) She is in a play and she causes everyone to look upon her -- when she acts, when she is not acting, but we are never sure when she is in one state or in another, she is too willfully transparent -- with admiration and desire. On a yacht, shortly after running through another trial performance of the play, Suzanne (that is her name) captures the eyes of everyone: she is a girl who has grown used to everyone loving her, wanting her. Her brother declares, "Look at her. My sister. She is beautiful." Full of a blithe spirit that infuses each scene with warmth and dimples, she makes everyone love her, and never against their will. Her youth is her salvation, but also her damnation. When Pialat (who plays the father, excellent) holds a late night intimate chat with his daughter, he brings our attention to her dimples -- aware of our love for her youth and energy, she smiles for us, and the father asks where the other dimple has gone: she is getting older, or her happiness is on the verge of being broken. She has lost a dimple like a child loses a tooth. He tells her that he is tired, he's "had enough." (There comes a time when a man or a woman has had enough, when parents have given too much of themselves.) His daughter's blooming careless youth only reminds him of his oldness, his fatigue, his anachronism, of the despair that such sacrifices bring. The next day he is gone. What a time to grow into womanhood: the sudden abandonment of the family by the father. Her brother takes over, a task too much for him; the mother, formerly patient and serene (who had been so secure in her love of her domineering husband, in the habitual comforts of domestic life), becomes mad, embittered. When formerly the mother had looked upon her daughter's late night truancies with a mixture of indulgence and censure, now she sees them as affronts on her own destitution: the daughter continues to enjoy the love of men, but the mother cannot bear her enforced frigidity.

Pialat cannot avoid Freudianisms. The brother, perhaps effete, is in love with his sister; unhealthily, it is insinuated. The mother's madness (and her feelings of resentment at her daughter, who is loved and wanted in place of her) magnetizes her son, whose own sense of betrayal and jealousy at the thought of his sister's sex life makes him cling to his mother. The brother, in spite of his nearly erotic love for her, beats his sister (to placate his mother): or maybe, because of this forbidden eroticization, he attempts to punish her -- as it were, punishing his own attachment to her. In any case, he is in over his head: he does not not know how to be "the man of the house." The gap the father leaves behind creates an intolerable black hole: it must be filled with a substitute, a marriage of some kind, a new union of parts. What was formerly a young girl's whims and experimentation with sex, becomes an alternative, a necessary lifestyle: she is despised at home, so she seeks consolation in the arms of lovers. She increases her nights out, increases the range and amount of her lovers. Each one is a forgetfulness, a joyous but impermanent passing of time. She is, however, inwardly disturbed by the prospect of loving another boy without the initiatory intoxication of lust: lust is easy, understandable, but Love is something else: disturbing, oppressive, irrational, beyond mere lust. The boy is beautiful, his eyes are a poet's, a brooding type: exactly the kind of boy a thoughtful girl would love, even against her erotic liking. When the father returns, unannounced, at a dinner party celebrating the new union of parts, the recent marriage which has partly mended the rift he left behind, he tears the fabric again: maybe his new life has failed him (he has failed himself) and he returns only to find that they have seemingly got on without him (yet, the mere presence of him weighs on us, on them: he has been missed, terribly, but he does not know it). This is the climax of the film -- what follows after stayed with me for some time.    

The force of this film sneaks up on you. I mentioned that it started out innocuously, to point out that it ends devastatingly. Perhaps this is what makes Pialat a master: his ability to develop characterization through a gradual increase of tension. We are always witnessing a graphic reality in which nothing particularly graphic occurs: emotions boil over, and often burst, but "life goes on." The stark madness of the mother subsides eventually,  and even after the most damning vituperations hurled at each other, the daughter, the son, and the mother return to a semblance of their calmer selves and latch on to the slightest remnant of composure: they go on because they have to go on. Something as terrible as a death in the family: the rupture of a household in which people leave fragments that never heal but wound again and again.

Pialat introduced the world to Bonnaire (who has strikingly become more beautiful with age) and it is Bonnaire who is the focus of the film: a worldly young girl in love with love-making, in love with love. When this sunny world is shattered for her, she has to recreate it, she has to find its linkage in the world that leads outside her broken home. This is Pialat's 6th film, but it is my first: a masterpiece.