Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I first heard of À Nos Amours as a Criterion film; later I saw Time Out rank it pretty high in its top 100 French films of all time, which made me more curious to see it. Winner of the Cesar Award in 1983, À Nos Amours centres around Suzanne, a French girl of 15 (when we first meet her) who breaks up with a boyfriend she likes after unthinkingly cheating on him. As life at home grows more unstable, she becomes increasingly promiscuous and is seemingly unable to love anyone. Her father, who she adored, abandoned the family, her mother is hysterical and her brother has become the tyrannical head of the household. After a few years she marries a man who she doesn't love but who brings her peace, believing it's too late to go back to her first boyfriend.To a degree, À Nos Amours explores the relationship between her promiscuity and her crumbling domestic life; her brother beats her for her affairs. There are incestuous overtones, as Suzanne asks him if he's jealous and later, he keeps going on and on about how she smells (!). But she also started sleeping around before her father split. To a degree, À Nos Amours is just a teen drama about her remorse of dumping her old boyfriend. That's less interesting, but not bad.There's definite erotic value in the film as well- particularly when her mother finds her sleeping naked (she's alone). We see only her back and a side of her breast, but it may be the sexiest part of the movie (where we often see more). Her mother scolds her as disgusting, and you want to defend her (the only reason her mother can call it disgusting is that it's "just not done," but it is done). Still, À Nos Amours is mainly a drama and mostly succeeds there.

Well, the movie got one thing right anyway. Sandrine Bonnaire is the essence of sixteen-year-old nubility and it comes in a delightful frame. Don't worry too much, though. There's very little nudity and no simulated sex. She can act too. Once in a while she grins. But her default expression is one of solemn and distant contempt. It happens to fit the role because she's not supposed to be a happy adolescent, despite her middle-class family.Sandrine lives at home with her father, her mother, and her possibly gender-confused, plump older brother. Her father, in this context, is the soul of common sense and tranquility. He's played by the director, Maurice Pialat, who had the good taste to give himself the good-guy role. Sandrine's mother, on the other hand, although she tries to live up to her responsibilities, is a whirlwind of hysteria with a waspish temper. She treat Sandrine the way my concierge treated me. She and Sandrine bat each other around -- really HARD, too, so you can hear the loud whacks as the blows land. When Mom isn't beating Sandrine, the brother is.I want to give the film points for its elegant dinner conversation with guests present. They argue over who's the better artist and fling around names like Ingre and Bonnard. And they're entirely serious except when making up portmanteau words like "Picasshole." Well, that's the French for you. In a fancy restaurant in Paris there was a ruckus at the next table and one of the staff came over and apologized to us, explaining that the waiter was a Cartesian.And how does Sandrine handle all this strife? Not well. She's really just a dependent kid, after all. She balls every boy who shows an interest in her, even if the kid can't speak French and, after intercourse, says, "Thanks a lot." With Sandrine's absent father and her mother the paragon of instability that she is, it's understandable that Sandrine's reaction is less than what Freud called "anaclitic." Sandrine isn't interested in older men, just horny high-school boys. And her musings sound like those of Henri, the existential cat. "It's terrible to love no one," and, "Sometimes it feels as if my heart has dried up."What eluded me was the point of the movie. Is it that married couples who have been together for twenty years find that they don't have much to say to one another, and so they argue a lot? Is it that teens who are striving for an identity outside of the household run into trouble with their mothers who demand that they obey orders as if they were still toddlers? Is it that, even outside the household, teens have trouble deciding who they are and what they want because they don't have enough experience to decide? Well, knock me down with a banal feather! I can tell you it wasn't that way when I struggled through high school. Oh, it was tough, sure, but there weren't any girls around who were as accommodating as Sandrine. You couldn't even get close to the plain-looking girls, let alone the devastating beauties. And these young punks take their access to her body for granted? I don't like those boys. Come to think of it, I don't like this movie because it has such lucky goons IN it. These kids are spoiled rotten. They don't have to put the least effort into what I yearned for, the swine. I ask you -- the sensitive and discerning viewer -- is it any wonder that the world is going to hell in a handbasket?

France dubbed this the best film of 1983, and named the love Sandrine Bonnaire, in her first credited role, as it's most promising actress for that year. It is easy to see why as she was a joy to watch as she flitted from bed to bed trying to find happiness. I am sure there are many who will shirk at the thought of admiring the 15-year-old's body.Those not in the loop on French films will not appreciate the style and grace of her life as she deals with a family that fights all the time, and can only find an outlet for emotions in the arms of willing lovers. But, she avoids the one who loves her Luc (Cyr Boitard), treating him like dirt when he says he loves her.Excellent film with great performances by Maurice Pialat as the father and Evelyne Ker as the mother, as well as a knockout job by Bonnaire.

Being so restrained, blunt and straightforward, Pialat's film is also enormously touching. The concreteness of the world he creates here is tangible. Psychological realism true in each detail, and as ensemble. The brutal restraint is somehow disconcerting—being given the bad habits inflicted by the standard psychology of most other films. Pialat's project was a naturalist one, hence the impression of a thing just begun, just started, still in progress. (It would be, anyway, absurd and stupid to try reducing Pialat's implicit aesthetics to some theoretical statements and criticism's clichés.) What is obvious is that Pialat achieved his aim—finding the fourth dimension of this coming of age story. For me,Pialat might not be worthy of love; he is certainly worthy of respect. In his movies—not only in this one, but in several others as well—one finds not only probity—but also genuine power, inspiration, the strength of a secret master, Pialat. Good and serious director, keen psychologist, avid of femme's perfume and scent, intelligent and uncompromising. In psychology, Pialat rightly perceived the distances and the gaps and ,as it were, the laws of the perspective. In this movie, Pialat uses this sensational and hidden knowledge to tell the tribulations of a gamine. The amazing lead actress is worth seeing; with her, the film took one more chance at the ineffable. Any movie is made with elements,but it lives out of the rapports and the ideas.On the cinematographic elements' level,Pialat's movie is austere.There is no bit of stylization,but each element has a 4th. dimension:the rapports' level.This dimension is widened by the music.Purcell's suitable music gives the action a strange coherence.The movie is made out of relations,rapports,reflections.Far from being some kind of a flat realism,Pialat's movie lives entirely out of this wealth of thought.Most important,this strengthener,firm,intelligent,bitter,even poignant realism is not fake.A courageous decision is the refusal of all stylization.(The "cruel movie",the ferocious movie relies on stylization.)True realism means ideas,reflection,a lively mind.Far from being mechanical and passive,it is fertile and elastic.This movie is also a medicament.I find it disappointing that only 3 comments were written here for "À nos amours ".Also,the weighted average vote of 7.5 / 10 is unfair. Miss Bonnaire is a standout.Her cinema presence in "A Nos ..." surrounds the viewer.