Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/23/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 23, 2020

À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Sandrine Bonnaire and Maurice Pialat in À Nos Amours

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Bresnehard, Cyril Collard, Cyr Boitard, Jacques Fischi, Valérie Schlumberger, Evelyne Ker, Pierre Novion, Tsilka Theodoru. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Jacques Loiseleux. Production design: Jean-Paul Camail, Arlette Langmann. Film editing: Valérie Condroyer, Sophie Coussin, Yann Dedet.

Maurice Pialat is one of those directors who don't make it easy for viewers. He likes jump cuts from time to place that keep you slightly off-balance, and he seems to be obsessed with dysfunction. Not that À Nos Amours is hard to follow or hard to watch. It's graced with a skillful performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, making her screen debut in the key role of Suzanne, the teenage daughter in a family so volatile that it sometimes erupts into blows. Pialat himself plays the father, who finally gets so fed up with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and his dilettantish son (Dominique Bresnehard) that he abandons them -- not before knocking them around a few times. In response to this family craziness, Suzanne turns promiscuous, ignoring the attentions of Luc (Cyr Boitard), who loves her, and sleeping around until she finally decides to marry Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), though at the end of the film she has left him and is off to America. There's a raw immediacy to the film, created in part by Pialat's indifference to conventional exposition and transitions, so that we often feel as if we've been thrust into rooms to which we haven't been invited.