We’re back! The 16th AOAFF powered by DEI presents Maurice Pialat’s "À Nos Amours" at Laïs cinema

A fatal summer will mark the romantic awakening of 15-year-old Suzanne, a girl from the suburbs of Paris who refuses to give herself to her lover, but suddenly offers her body to strangers with a stinging indifference—not out of perversion, but out of a desperate need to feel something that transcends the suffocating petty-bourgeois straitjacket. As her overprotective father becomes a familiar absence, she abandons herself to carnal explorations. She seeks love, but finds only sex. She seeks intimacy, but collides with the hysteria of a disintegrating family.

Maurice Pialat directs his own take on the Electra Complex, focusing the film’s emotional core on the complex relationship between Suzanne and her father. By participating in the editing himself, he takes his naturalistic style to the extreme. Detached from the urban elegance of the Nouvelle Vague, he films beneath the surface and any pretense of realism. He uses the camera like a scalpel that cuts through film reality and reveals what lies beneath. As a result, the film bleeds; everything in its action becomes urgent. The actors (topped by newcomer Sandrine Bonnaire) seem to be taken aback themselves by the intensity as they improvise the intra-family conflicts. Pialat, however, has the insight to surrender control to the moment and to spontaneity. He doesn’t control the film’s climax; he replaces dialogue with a violent outburst of truth, and ultimately lets the film explode, leaving behind the sharp shards of a family falling apart, turning their dinner into a battlefield.

Staring squarely into the chaos of human relationships, the director rejects all moralizing and any form of catharsis. He leaves behind a mosaic of shattered emotions and the echo of a youth that refused to come to terms with the misery of the adult world. “To Our Loves” is a film that is shockingly raw and electrifying. It is a monument “to our loves,” the small ones, the great ones, the platonic ones, the true ones—which, like a scalpel them too, tore through the poorly played illusions that cinema occasionally served us and left deep scars. Thodoris Karamanolis