A NOS AMOURS

by Kevin Koehler

I don’t know whether Seinfeld creator Larry David had A Nos Amours in mind for the mock Eurotrash film that appears in repeated episodes, Rochelle, Rochelle. There are so many French films that could be described as “a young girl’s strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk” – the sexual activities/awakenings of pretty young teenagers is somewhat of a national obsession. It’s hard to pick just one.

Maurice Pialat is widely known as “the French Cassavetes” (or, if you are British, “the French Ken Loach”) which is the shorthand way of saying he’s French, made films on the fringe of the European studio system, imbued his pictures with unsentimental realism, and is well-liked by film snobs who see Pialat’s lack of relative mainstream success on these shores as proof of their sophisticated taste. His feature length debut, L’Enfance Nue, was tendered the Francois Truffaut mark of approval (it was produced by the master) as well as a Prix Jean Figo. That award is given each year to a promising French director, generally a young one though Pialat was a forty-four when he got his. He cemented his reputation as un auteur with 1987’s Sous le soleil de Satan, which not only won him the Palme d'Or but iconoclast status for life when he flipped off some booing audience members while accepting it. Sounds like a guy I could like.

If only A Nos Amours were a better film.

The picture stars sixteen-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire as the frequently-nude (not as titillating as it sounds) Suzanne, a confused French teenager wandering from one hollow sexual encounter to the next. She says she’s only happy when she’s in the arms of one of her paramours and we don’t blame her: Suzanne’s home-life is at best unusual, at worst fairly grotesque. Dad (played by Pialat himself) flies the coop early on, leaving his son, pudgy tyrant Robert (Dominique Besnehard) in charge of both daughter and half-crazy Mom (Evelyne Ker). Emotional and physical abuse relents only for short passages of awkward conversation, often hinging on some sort of inappropriately sexual subject that tinges everything in something akin to unconsummated incest. Mom calls daughter a slut who trades sex advice with Dad while fielding interminable compliments about her body from her brother who himself has become a surrogate husband to Mom. Everyone in this family (Suzanne included) seeks to make life miserable for everyone else, and in their own creepy ways they succeed.

Plenty of women seek the affections of too many men (or too many of the wrong men) to compensate for an absent father – such are the incontrovertible facts that cliché is made of. It’s the sort of unsophisticated platitude-masquerading-as-wisdom we’ve come to expect from daytime talk shows, peddled to prostitutes and cheating spouses. In his own quasi-verité manner, I imagine Pialat was seeking to subvert the cliché, deconstruct it, transcend it – rarely does it actually come off. The meandering quarrels, beatings, and post-coital chit-chats all have the feel of work-shopping actors being put through an exercise rather than real life, even the life of a sexually-obsessed French person. Pialat never truly gets under the surface of these characters, frquently mistaking the bizarre and cruel for honest characterization (it’s no surprise Catherine Breillat is such a fan of a the picture). One hundred minutes pass, and yet we still feel as though we do not know these characters – they remain only our acquaintances, obnoxious ones at that, and if it’s all the same we rather wish we hadn’t been introduced.

Interesting footnote: One of Suzanne’s first sexual conquests is an American tourist – we meet him as his has an argument with some French sailors, whom he calls warmongers. This is probably the only time in cinema you will see an American character call a French one a warmonger.

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