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. 

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor. 

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters.