À nos amours

Maurice Pialat cast a fifteen-year-old with no experience, put himself in the film as her father, and won the César for Best Film. Sandrine Bonnaire took Most Promising Actress and became, more or less overnight, the most watched young actor in France. It had already taken the Louis-Delluc for 1983.

Suzanne lives in a small flat above her family's furrier workshop with a father who is on his way out, a mother whose grip is going and an older brother who has taken over the policing of her. She begins seeing boys, then men, with a detachment that the film declines to explain or condemn. Pialat's method was famously brutal — long unrehearsed takes, actors kept off balance, dialogue improvised on the day — and the dinner-table scene in which he walks back into the flat was reportedly unannounced to the cast. What is on screen is genuine surprise.

The film sits at the point where French cinema stopped being polite about families. It has none of the New Wave's lightness about young women and sex; it treats Suzanne's appetite as a fact rather than a subject, and it locates the real violence in the people who keep discussing her. Bonnaire went on to Varda's Vagabond two years later. Pialat, who spent his career being difficult in public, never made anything more exposed than this.