review for À Nos Amours on AllMovie

Maurice Pialat elicited an award-winning performance from fledgling actress Sandrine Bonnaire in this brilliantly penetrating examination of the life of an unhappy teenaged girl. Near the end of the film, Pialat, who also plays the father of this girl who seems so incapable of love, says to her, "Some can love." "Not many," she replies, echoing Freud's saturnine assessment of the human race. The director eschews conventional dramatic structure, opting instead to carve out a cross-section of moments in the life of his heroine so fresh as to seem improvised. Except for the boy who loves her, the magnetically attractive 16-year-old Suzanne (Bonnaire) is on a mission to have sex with any male who interests her. She enjoys flaunting her sexual powers, yet, unable to become emotionally involved with any boy, she becomes increasingly more depressed. In what may seem a conservative but not implausible take on her angst, the film begins to connect it with her family's slow disintegration. Her mother (Evelyne Ker), a raving, puritanical hysteric, mercilessly abuses the girl for her behavior, with the help of her like-minded brother. Although only the tip of the iceberg is revealed, it's no surprise that her more temperate father, who is also the girl's confidant, is leaving the family for another woman. In a startling pre-wedding scene which offers a sliver of perspective on these clouded relationships, Pialat seems to assure the family's demise. At the film's end, nothing about this girl is clearer than it was at the beginning, yet one has an abiding feeling that she's been sentenced to an emotional gulag.