In the clip above, I discuss “À Nos Amours” (“To Our Loves”), from 1983, the greatest, wildest, and most mysterious of the French director Maurice Pialat’s many youth-centered films. Writing in the magazine several months ago (in a review available to subscribers) about Criterion’s DVD release of Maurice Pialat’s first feature, “L’Enfance Nue” (“Naked Childhood”) and his early short film “L’Amour Existe,” I sketched his life and career in passing: born in 1925, grew up in the working-class suburbs of Paris, failed as a painter, got a late start as a filmmaker, directing his first feature in 1968, making films with shots like “rough blocks of emotion that seem torn from his inner turmoil and thrust onto the screen by hand.” He was always interested in youth—from his first feature (a scathing view of a troubled boy) and the 1979 drama “Passe Ton Bac D’Abord” (“First, Graduate from High School”) to his last film, from 1995, “Le Garçu,” in which Pialat’s young son Antoine plays a major role alongside Gérard Depardieu. (The director died in 2003.)
In “À Nos Amours,” the teen-aged Sandrine Bonnaire, in her first major role, is a force of nature whose blend of voracity and vulnerability is packaged with a charm akin to the panther’s sleek grace, lithe agility, and wary gaze. From the start, she commands attention—the lusty fascination of older men and younger ones, the admiration of other young women, and the tense expectation of a theatrical audience, even the handful of spectators at summer camp who hang on her every word in a performance of a play (it’s Musset’s “On ne badine pas avec l’amour”). And Pialat implicates himself in her web by giving himself a leading role in the movie, playing her father. The story itself—which Pialat co-wrote with Arlette Langmann (who was his companion and was also the brother of the director Claude Berri)—is based on the Langmann family and its conflicts. Serge Toubiana, the director of the Cinémathèque Française, wrote in his blog that the film “depicts, in a fictional way, Arlette’s youth: the brother, played by Dominique Besnehard (the imaginary double of Claude Berri), the father who is a tailor working with fur (Maurice Pialat played the role) and the mother (Evelyne Ker), who gets kicked around.” (Berri, for his part, wasn’t happy, and, in 2005, told an interviewer, “He should just have told his own life story and not mine and my father’s… As for me, he makes me look ridiculous.”)
The core of the movie is the young woman’s sexual voracity, or, more specifically, her deep and unsatisfied emotional needs, which she tries to fulfill by way of sex. In casting himself as her father, Pialat adds a frisson of the illicit to his directorial gaze, which is typical of Pialat: he seeks danger and conflict wherever he can find it, and always takes the most emotionally daring and risky path, particularly regarding himself.
I posted last week, in another context, about Pialat’s conflictual relationship with the filmmakers of the French New Wave and his contempt for their cinephilic preoccupations, and also about his own dissatisfaction with himself and his career (he made only ten feature films, plus the mini-series “La Maison des Bois”). Here’s a living image of his conflict with viewers and his fellow professionals: a clip of him receiving the Golden Palm at the 1987 Cannes festival for the powerful film “Under the Sun of Satan” (starring Bonnaire, Depardieu, and Pialat)—the prize, announced by Yves Montand; Pialat, introduced by Catherine Deneuve; all to a chorus of whistles (the local equivalent of boos) and catcalls; and Pialat, who takes the stage and says, “I won’t be untrue to my reputation. I am, above all, happy this evening for all the shouts and whistles you’ve directed at me; and, if you don’t like me, I can tell you that I don’t like you either.” But he was equally tough on himself, saying, in a 1994 interview, “I’m someone who completely blew his chance and who could have done much better in his life.” He flayed himself—and others—with the same fury he delivered onscreen.
