A Nos Amours (The Criterion Collection)

A French teen becomes promiscuous and fights with her father as their family falls apart.

Some viewers might watch A nos amours--about a young woman who uses sexual encounters as a refuge from family strife--seeking something salacious; those viewers will likely be traumatized by the movie's startling, raw, and disturbing emotional force. Sandrine Bonnaire (Vagabond, Monsieur Hire) makes her remarkable debut as Suzanne, who at 15 has a mix of tender and hollow experiences with men. But when her father (played by the movie's maverick director, Maurice Pialat) leaves, her brother and mother implode and turn their frustrations on Suzanne with brutal force. Pialat (Loulou, Van Gogh), like John Cassavetes (A Woman Under the Influence), uses a deceptively simple style to capture performances that seem almost painfully naked and unfiltered by an actor's consciousness. Pialat is particularly attuned to the interplay of the family--you can almost touch the emotional threads between father, daughter, brother, and mother as they struggle with and against each other. When the absent father returns home in the middle of a dinner party, the tension pops off the screen. The intimacy of A nos amours is an amazing achievement--sometimes hypnotic, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking, always compelling. --Bret Fetzer