À nos amours (To our loves)

It opens on a rehearsal of summer-camp theatrics, but Marjorie Morningstar this is not. Seventeen-year-old Suzanne (the incomparable Sandrine Bonnaire, in her first film) rehearses nothing in life, driven by the power her impetuousness holds over others. In this, she is very like the film's director. At home in Paris, Suzanne is the eye of the family storm, her sexuality ratcheting up the suppressed passions of her narcissistic brother and insecure mother, and sending her father (played by Pialat) out of the house. Suzanne alone knows that her joyless promiscuity is a cry for help she is too smart to accept. Attuned to Bonnaire's subtle messages, the film simmers, then erupts, twice, in Fassbinderian family fisticuffs—once, legend has it, to the surprise even of the cast as the prodigal father returns unexpectedly, lending the film not the patina of truth, but its essence, the triumph of Pialat's approach.