With our loves

With our loves is a film French carried out by Maurice Pialat left the November 16th 1983.

Synopsis

Suzanne is fifteen years old. On vacation on the Side of Azure it pushes back Luc, the young man who is in love with it, then is given to unknown American on the beach. Of return to Paris it multiplies the adventurous in love ones. His/her parents separate. It must face the hostility of her mother and her brother. Its marriage shows a failure. After having re-examined her father it leaves to join a former lover in the United States.

Elements of analysis

With our loves trace history of Suzanne. It is not, does not become a free woman. She butine, multiplies, collects the lovers but, if she finds the pleasure (she does not feel well that “ in the arms of a guy ”), she does not know satisfaction, which condemns it to the escape ahead. While choosing not to have a physical relation with Luc, it separates sexuality and love. The film shows its advance, but it does not go nowhere.

Lost paradise

The first time that Suzanne meets Luc, it joined it in full nature (plans 21 to 27). It practices the wild camp-site. Sincerely in love, it made hundreds of kilometers in the hope make love with it. It shows him its desire but Suzanne pushes back it. Why? Pialat gives us a track. In the plans which precede the meeting immediately (plans 18 to 20, which appears to break the rate/rhythm of film), it shows Suzanne to be made hoot by the driver of a red car. It looks it with scorn, but it must feel attacked by the man who takes it for a prostitute at the edge of the road. This glance concupiscent posed on it perverts its meeting with Luc. They are in a kind of garden of Eden, but sexuality grinds around. Suzanne refuses to make it penetrate.

The plan of separation, at the edge of the road, is very beautiful (27). Suzanne is turned over and moved away from Luc. Its gesture echoes that of the credits (7) where, while being turned, it was offered to the glance of three men (of which his/her brother). Luc sets out again as it came (in hitch-hiking) after having offered a gift of which the spectator does not know anything, if not which it is beautiful (26).

It is not by refusal of sexuality that Suzanne pushes back Luc, it is because of a made feel guilty vision of the sex. Luc likes it, it clamp on several occasions, and she likes it too. She never says it to him clearly, she says it to another, in Bernard, in plan 118. It is not to dirty this pure love, innocent, without spot, that she refuses with him. The analysis of the other meetings with Luc confirms it. We will return there. But, meanwhile, Suzanne multiplies the lovers. She becomes a collector. The choice of the first lover is very symptomatic.

The choice of Suzanne

After having left Luc, Suzanne will dredge. The dress which it wears has only one strap, it reveals only half of itself, as if it were cut into two. Its personality is unbalanced. On several occasions, its gestures (plane 30-31) prove its faintness, its discomfort.

Whereas it could choose a French, in addition a sailor vêtu of white (it likes the uniforms), it throws his reserved on an American equipped with black with which any communication, any division other than physical is impossible. Plans 30 and 31 show incommunicability by completely unimportant dialogs, mixing, in an unbearable pidgin, English and French bits. As for the plan 32, which precedes the act, it is completely quiet. Suzanne sleeps with the American, they are his terms; she does not say, she will never say, to have made love (plane 37). Afterwards, she pronounces only one sentence: “ Not of what, it is free ”. The “free” word has a double direction: it means that Suzanne is not a prostitute. She tests the need to affirm it to avoid being marked about it: it is an answer in comparison with the motorist. He also means that its gesture does not engage it with nothing.

The comments which it makes itself on its behavior are contradictory and show that it tests at the same time attraction and repulsion for the sex: “ They was super… but it is ugly ” (plane 41). As of the following plans (42-50), one sees it with a new lover and it pushes back Luc whom it meets again, including Juste before his marriage.

Short meetings with Luc

Luc and Suzanne are re-examined four times, twice on the initiative of Luc, twice with that of Suzanne. They have evil to give up one the other. It is manifest for Luc who shouts his love in spite of the “unsteady” behavior of Suzanne. It is shown more discreetly for Suzanne which telephones Luc without daring to speak to him (she says it in plan 114), will see it during its course of painting (61-65) and in the clothes shop (154-160) where the glance of Luc flees that of Suzanne when he is posed on him. It is extremely probable that in plan 167, during the scene where she wanders solitary in the streets of Paris after the dispute with Luc in the store, she raises her glance towards the apartment of this last. This gray, dark and rainy scene (164-168), the only one of film, except the credits, where extra-diégètique music is heard, shows the distress of Suzanne. The use of the same music as on the credits of the beginning (shone upon, on a boat, the open large horizon) made feel, by contrast, the dead end in which Suzanne was misled.

The dream of Suzanne

The most instructive meeting on the sexuality of Suzanne takes place in a bar (plans 106-116). Before the arrival of Luc, Suzanne tells a dream with his/her comrades: “ I made funny dream this night… I dreamed that I walked in a corridor of subway… and there is somebody who seizes me by the arm, bloody extremely… Then I am turned over, it was Luc! Then he says to me: ” Now that you were well made kiss, bitch, I will be able to kiss you in my turn… “He tightened me bloody extremely, he involved me towards him… Then, after, I awoke… ”.

Dreams or nightmare? What Suzanne reproaches Luc, it is to want to do with it what the others do whereas he likes it. The vulgarity of the words employed proves its impure vision of sexuality. Luc arrives immediately afterwards in the bar. They leave to discuss. The framework is very tight, their bodies are touched and, as from the moment when Luc tries to embrace it, Suzanne is closed and become aggressive. It treats Luc of “bastard” and known as that he disgusts it, as if the dream were reality, it takes again the terms of them. It does not give any explanation, does not answer the interrogations of Luc from which the only wrong is not to separate sexuality and love.

About Luc, we know few things but the fact that Pialat makes a student in painting of it shows its sympathy to him, because it is also its initial training. It tries last once to conquer Suzanne the day before its marriage. They still meet in a bar (197-209). The dialog is very serene and instructive. Suzanne says that it reached happiness with him and that it wanted to die in Courchevel… “ On the toboggan ”! Happiness would be thus a play of child whom the sex should not soil. Luc proposes in Suzanne “to make it happy” and “offers its fifteen years to him”, i.e. a sexual relationship and the return to the lost purity. Suzanne answers him that it is impossible. For it, the sex is not innocent. During this dialog filmed in fields/reverse shots, one notices a false connection (voluntary?) on a bottle of Coca-Cola. What symbolizes this bottle?

Suzanne chooses to marry with Jean-Pierre because it “makes it calm”. Its marriage fails very quickly, it has other lovers and his/her father says that it “ share in honeymoon with another… which it will never manage to like somebody ” (plane 281). At the end of film, it from goes away with Michel, present as of the beginning, as if it had turned in round. It leaves far, to America, in San Diego where there are many American sailors, about a middle identical to that of the beginning, shone upon and hot. But its escape ahead is not used for nothing. She seeks new horizons, but its interior horizon is closed. Pialat closes film by a very significant freeze frame. Suzanne is motionless, fixed, captive of itself.

With our loves is a pessimistic film on the announced vacuum of an existence.

Data sheet

Distribution

Reward

  • César of the best film 1984
  • César of the best Most promising young actress for Sandrine Bonnaire 1984
  • Price Louis Delluc 1983

Around film

  • One will notice in the distribution some exceptional names: in addition to the presence of Pialat itself, the director of the most known casting of the French cinema, Dominique Besnehard holds one of the main roles; Cyril Collard made there its only appearance as an actor (except his own film the Nights deer ) and one will also note the presence of the scenario writer Jacques Fieschi.

See too

  • Card Critical IMDb
  • teaching File on cndp.fr
  • on the site of the film club of Caen

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