A Nos Amours - an impression

Another day, another film, another unseemly review..

Maurice Pialat's "a nos amours" wanders a bit aimlessly to begin with, assaults its viewers with uncertainities, ungainly plot twists (was there a plot?), asks a lot of questions (and leaves them unanswered) and finally ends on you with a classic dinner scene which wasn't in the script until it was acted out on the spur of the moment.

What film manages to do successfully is create those unique sensory pleasures that you only get from a story free of all plot conventions, cinematic traditionalism and from a filmmaker who has tried hard to maintain a distance from the mainstream. In his own words he was trying to sit on the fringes of the french cinema. What you find is this cocky individual who relied entirely on his instincts to throw the script aside and made the film as it was shot. The script was just a pretense to have all these actors together in a place and make them act. Moreover, he featured himself in a character which although should have but hadn't died and made a rather presumptuous re-entry in the dinner scene.

How should the actors react when you slap them unannounced? I don't know, neither did they. But they reacted, creating those little, almost insignificant physical errors, which somehow in the film look so unbelievably real that they embolden the cinematic truth with a new light.

The film is also full of what you call character inconsistencies; the father is both noble and vile. He would have look of deep empathy in his eyes but he will hit you in the next moment. There are scenes of extreme domestic violence. It is shot in a direct manner but narrated in the most convoluted fashion, leaving large plot holes for you to fill.

And I don't know why but it is all so endearing!!