Haskell Painter

With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching À nos amours is one of his greatest achievements. In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À nos amours is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.

We’re all “cameramen” these days, but the more our YouTube opuses dominate everything from reality TV to the Paranormal Activity movies, the further we get from understanding cinematography as an artform. The elegant Jack Cardiff, a British painter, shooter and ace anecdote-teller (here captured near the end of his magnificent career), will always represent the finer, even fussier side of the lushness of movies. Martin Scorsese, one of this doc’s many articulate testifiers to the Technicolor expert’s importance, puts it well: “Maybe it’s because of where I came from,” Scorsese says, referring to his NYC mean streets. “Neorealism I had right around me. If I wanted to go to a movie, I wanted something…fantastical.”