Overrated and overhyped

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

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.

This is the story of a teenage French girl (Sandrine Bonnaire) with a difficult home life. Both her father (who abandons the family) and her older brother (who regularly physically assaults her) seem to have an unnatural interest in her sexuality, while her mother (who may the worst of them all) is a raving hysteric who eggs everyone else on. Not surprisingly, the girl is quite promiscuous, availing herself of any number of boys and men. In an American movie like this, her male paramours would at best be panting dogs and at worst villainous cads taking advantage of a vulnerable girl, but here they're probably the most sympathetic people in the movie! The young girl is not unsympathetic by any means, but she simply refuses to be a victim and remains firmly in control, and no family member or lover ultimately seems to have much chance against her. She is similar to the kind of "feminist lolitas" that often appear in Catherine Breillat movies like "A Real Young Girl" and "36 Fillete"-- teen girls that are very desirable, but also wise beyond their years and in perfect control of their own sexuality, and thus never simply mere sex objects. It's surprising Bonnaire never worked directly with Breillat because she is a much more self-assured and commanding actress than any of the ones Breillat did work with. I don't know if I believe the IMDb dates regarding Bonnaire's age as her assured acting (and her nude body) suggest that she was somewhat older than the character she's playing here, but she's very impressive regardless. Interestingly, while she became a very formidable actress in her later years (especially in films like Claude Chabrol's "Initiation"), she would not really be one of your more glamorous and sexy French actress. She certainly compares well to her contemporaries at the time like Emmanuelle Beart and Sophie Marceau, but while they would become leading ladies, she stayed more of a character actress.Ironically, the one problem I had with the movie is that Bonnaire and her character is perhaps TOO self-assured and as an actress Bonnaire tends to dominate the rest of the cast too much. It might be a feminist statement to have young female protagonist who is this self-confident, but I don't know that it's necessarily very realistic.

Others have already said that "À nos amours" is a great film, even more have said that Sandrine Bonnaire was a knockout in her demanding rôle as Suzanne. There is a sort of timeline, a beginning and an end, but this is really a film about a personal journey through a part of Suzanne's late adolescence. Young people who have watched the film recently are sometimes very annoyed with Suzanne, but this only proves that Miss Bonnaire has made them care about her character even to the point that they perhaps want to shake her, to take her into a corner and tell her what mistakes she is making. There is also a conflict which some pretend had disappeared by the end of the "swinging sixties" - the generation gap between the sexual mores of parents and adolescents, which was of course still real in the early eighties and remains so in many cultures. Unpredictable behaviour (by Suzanne's brother, for example) is also a real part of family life for many young people. Every time I watch the film (and I have seen it very often, as I used it in my French classes more than once) I notice details which had escaped me or which I had forgotten. Pialat made other great films, but "À nos amours" remains my favourite. If possible watch it in French, with subtitles if necessary - but see it before you die!

Sandrine Bonnaire has matured into one of the finest French actresses of her generation - and incidentally directed a fine documentary about her handicapped sister, Sabine - yet this is only early promise fulfilled as this movie illustrates. Just sixteen when it was shot Bonnaire exudes the confidence of someone twice her age and easily dominates the film against fine support including Oliver Reed lookalike director Pialat himself as the father, absent during the central section of the movie, who is clearly responsible for Bonnaire's drifting from man to man. Dysfunctional families are seldom the basis for 'entertaining' stories be they on stage or screen but this is highly watchable and can support multiple viewings.