The Cinematheque

“A triumph … It’s simply one of the most magical encounters ever recorded by a movie camera: Pialat and Bonnaire, father and daughter, two artists at the top of their form.”

Jean-Michel Frodon, Film Comment

Selected by many critics as one of the best films of the 1980s, Maurice Pialat’s searing domestic drama features a remarkably intense performance by a 16-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire (in her screen debut) as Suzanne, an adolescent girl whose search for the love denied her by an oppressive family is thwarted by her own inability to feel love. As her family disintegrates around her, she embarks on a series of increasingly promiscuous affairs, and finds herself the victim of abuse from her hysterical mother and brother. Pialat himself appears as Suzanne’s brooding, authoritarian father; a slap he receives in one scene from Evelyne Ker, the actress playing his wife, was apparently unscripted and provoked by Ker’s anger at the director’s tyrannical conduct. There are tour-de-force displays of naturalistic, improvisational acting from Pialat’s entire cast, a mix of amateurs and professionals.

In French with English subtitles

“Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, À nos amours remains as startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy, as it was in 1983.”

Molly Haskell

“I recently saw this again on the big screen, and when the movie was over, I stood up in the cinema and looked around at the others in the audience, as if to ask, ​‘Did you see what I just saw?’ I was so overwhelmed by the power of the film, I almost couldn’t breathe.”

Ira Sachs, Sight and Sound