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From the producer of the acclaimed The Page Turner comes "a riveting, nail-biting journey into the obsession and jealousy."
Divorced mother Elsa Valentin’s (Catherine Frot) life is fraught with tension, fighting for her son in a bitter custody battle and juggling a demanding job. But nothing can prepare for what happens when she crosses paths with Lola, a young girl whom she believes to be the daughter she lost in a hospital fire over six years ago.
Unable to let go of the desperate hope that her daughter might still be alive, Elsa begins to ingratiate herself with Lola’s own mother Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire), inching her way into Lola’s life.
At the expense of her own increasingly distraught family, Elsa’s obsession heightens and her behaviour turns increasingly disturbing. But how far will she go for what only she believes is the unsettling truth?
Based on an incredible true story.
Film: Angel Of Mine
Release date: 13th September 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 91 mins
Director: Safy Nebbou
Starring: Catherine Frot, Sandrine Bonnaire, Wladimir Yordanoff, Antoine Chappey, Michel Aumont
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Studio: In2Film
Format: DVD
Country: France
Film: A Nos Amours
Release date: 22md March 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 94 mins
Director: Maurice Pialat
Starring: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Besnehard
Genre: Drama
Studio: Eureka!
Format: DVD
Country: France
French director Maurice Pialat died in 2003, and his drama Police (1985) remains his best-known work, but this film from 1983 also deserves its re-release. It’s a highly disturbing, violent yet desperately touching and moving tale about the relationship between a teenage girl and her father, played mysteriously by Pialat himself, on top form.
The film has already been released on DVD in 2006, but only on region 1, by The Criterion Collection. This region 2 version, from the excellent Eureka!, has most of the extras from the Criterion edition, but boasts a new transfer, which looks gorgeous, especially in the opening scenes on a sun-drenched beach. Eureka! usually specialise in older classics – 1983 is pretty recent for them – but they have released this and Pialat’s Under The Sun Of Satan, which also stars Sandrina Bonnaire.
She was just 16 when she made her screen debut in A Nos Amours, and what a stunning entrance it is. She plays Suzanne, who, when we meet her, is a free spirit - a sexually voracious girl taking on a play in the south of France and making the most of the opportunities her role offers. She is camping with her dour, monosyllabic boyfriend but has flings with a sailor and a local.
It takes a while to tune in here, as the film lurches from scene to scene with no clues as to the time difference between them. Gradually we realise months have passed between the various encounters, but what is behind this mysterious girl? All becomes clear when Suzanne goes home to her parents’ house in Paris. The house is also their place of work – they are clothes makers and repairers, and use the poky apartment for labour day and night. Worse, her parents and brother are disturbed, abusive and distinctly nasty. Her brother is angry about his confused sexuality, her mother flies off at the slightest tension and her father beats her...
Pialat himself takes on the role of the father, and provides the key moments in the film. After banning Suzanne from going out with her friends – she ignores him, and sleeps with yet another boy, and he predictably flies into a rage. However, the scene turns on its head when he suddenly becomes tender, and shares an amazingly intense scene when he asks his daughter where her other dimple has gone. “When you live with someone you don’t notice these things,” he says sadly.
Clearly Suzanne has issues because of her volcanic parents and brother, and sees sex as a form of compensation and escape. Her father, equally, and obviously, is rather closer to his daughter than he should be. The film ends with two genuinely amazing scenes, the famous dinner party scene when he interrupts a fun gathering to cause upset, and an extended sequence when he accompanies his daughter to the airport. “Perhaps me and your mother should have done the same,” he says with genuine regret and weariness.
For a painfully young woman, Bonnaire produces a simply staggering performance as Suzanne. Playing a 15-year-old - Bonnaire was 16 – she invests her character with all of the complications and contradictions of that age. “I’m only happy when I’m with a chap,” she laments, and it’s said with genuine regret – she simply cannot work out why she is unhappy, nor why her parents seem to hate her so much. Clearly they have issues of their own, but it has produced a child who apparently can only get attention through her sexual attractiveness. When a stranger persuades her to have sex with him by buying her a Coke, he says thank you. “You’re welcome – it’s free” is her awful response. Bonnaire has the confused eyes and body of a teenager, and when she is beaten by her family – assaulted, actually – she appears genuinely in peril.
The double-disc set comes loaded with extras, including a concise but pertinent 16-minute interview with Bonnaire in 2003 just three months after Pialat’s death. She admits the director was something of a father figure to her, even though her father was alive and well during the film.
There is that new anamorphic transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio, and new and improved English subtitle translations. Disc two has L’Œil 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 Bonnaire, and other members of the cast and crew.
There is also a 48-page booklet containing a new essay about the film by writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt, a two-page image-essay by Craig Keller, and a transcript of the sit-down conversation that took place between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard in 1984, appearing for the first time in an English translation.
All of Eureka’s releases are worth investigating but this is a particularly fine example of a full release of a slightly forgotten early-80s classic. MM
