A portrait of youth in bloom; a tale of one family's dissolution; a reflection upon the danger and the mystery in living. Maurice Pialat's serene, perilous masterwork provides the movie romance a definitive check and eminently deceptive balance – the X scratched on top of the O.
In an astonishing film debut, Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a free spirit and the vessel for an almost Brontëan choler. She's 16, and men exist – diverse lovers, an overbearing brother, and the father portrayed by Pialat himself in an unforgettable turn that displays the full magnitude of the cinema giant's tenderness, force-of-will, and presence of being.
Woven through with indelible images and heart-stopping moments (and culminating in the infamous "dinner party scene"), A nos amours (To Our Romance / Here's to Love) is a pure creation, a film that will live so long as there's still either movies or love.
A Nos Amours will be released on 2-disc UK DVD by Masters of Cinema on 22nd March 2010 at the RRP of £19.99. Featuring a new anamorphic transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio and improved English subtitle translations, plus the following extras:
- 16-minute 2003 interview with star Sandrine Bonnaire, conducted by former Cahiers du cinéma editor-in-chief, and current director of the Cinémathèque Française, Serge Toubiana;
- L'Oeil humain [The Human Eye], a 55-minute film by director Xavier Giannoli that analyses A nos amours. and features former Cahiers du cinéma editorial director Jean-Michel Frodon, actors Jacques Fieschi and Sandrine Bonnaire, and other members of the cast and crew;
- 14-minute excerpt from a 1983 TV interview with Maurice Pialat from the set of A nos amours, and featuring rushes of scenes that don't appear in the finished film;
- 31 minutes of video screen-tests from 1982 for various actors that variously show up in and do not appear in the finished film;
- Original theatrical trailer for A nos amours, along with trailers for the six other Maurice Pialat films released by The Masters of Cinema Series.
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