A Nos Amours

24/09/2025

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Adrift in the Incoherence of the Will

Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours is a slippery account of a teenage girl’s awakening, played by an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire, who can look like she is barely into adolescence or well into her twenties, depending on the expression on her face and the situation in which she finds herself. In one scene, Suzanne is talking to her father (played by Pialat), and he asks her about her dimples and says she used to have two and now she only one, as she could be fourteen. Later in the film, when her first love Luc says he still loves her and wants them to try again, she could be ten years older. She tells Luc she has changed and she doesn’t know if she can be happy again as she was when they were young and holidaying in the Alps. He tells her he will make her fifteen again. She replies, saying, ‘‘I’m not fifteen anymore.’’ How old she is, we cannot quite say, as Pialat insists on radical transitions that leave us unsure how much time has passed since the film began. We do know at the start, she is sixteen, and the moment she references when she was happy in the Alps isn’t a comment about anything we have witnessed. When she speaks of her happiness before, we have to take her word for it; we only have evidence of her unhappiness from sixteen onwards as she breaks up with Luc and takes up with various lovers she hopes will be resolved by marrying Jean-Pierre – played by the Cyril Collard, who was ten years older than Bonnaire, but looks like he could be around twenty.
Pialat’s work often focuses on the intensity of situations and the ambiguous nature of a person’s motivations, all of which are exacerbated by radical transitions that leave the viewer trying to comprehend not only what the characters feel, but also how the event fits within the narrative's cause and effect. To explain the originality of Pialat’s project, to comprehend the ambiguities he insists upon and the intensities he seeks, we can work through various scenes in the film, including the ones above. How would a filmmaker who seeks to clarify a feeling usually do so? When Suzanne says she was happy at fifteen, the filmmaker would have probably offered this scene either as a prologue or as a flashback. The viewer could match Suzanne’s assumptions with prior evidence, as we recall that moment in the Alps, or with a flashback informing us of how she felt, or perhaps both if the director doesn’t want to leave much ambiguity, or wishes to create it by forcing us to recognise a mismatch between how Suzanne remembers the events we have witnessed. The film could have simply chosen a flashback that would leave us wondering if she is offering a subjective account as she wishes to remember it more positively in her now disillusioned state. Instead, it remains an enigmatic remark and all the more so when Suzanne says that she was so happy in the Alps that she wanted to die with Luc on the toboggan. Is she being melodramatic or registering how unhappy she has been in the intervening period? We cannot say, as Pialat insists, we take it at face value: in the expression on her visage.
Halfway through the film, after her father has left home and her mother has difficulty coping, Suzanne tells her older brother that she wants to leave home too and go to boarding school. The film cuts to her in a Paris boutique, and she sees her friend Anne with Luc. They are now a couple, and the exchange between Anne and Suzanne reveals that she has been at boarding school for a while. If it weren’t for this dialogue exchange, we might have assumed it was the day after her discussion with her brother as the film elides her arrival at the school and her stay there. We could also wonder how long Anne and Luc have been together, and how besotted Anne is with a young man who still seems in love with his ex. Earlier in the film, Luc shows up in a cafe and Suzanne is there with some friends, including Anne. Luc asks to speak to Suzanne, they go outside and Anne follows them out, with another friend saying she is on heat, and is after Luc. Suzanne says that after Luc says he loves her and tries to kiss her, she will never be with him; that he only wants to sleep with her because she has slept with other guys. The film cuts to Anne looking on, and after Suzanne walks off, Anne enters the frame and says Luc should ‘snap out of it.’ The next time we see Anne and Luc together is in the boutique, and now a couple. When in the cafe scene quoted above, Luc suggests once again they should get back together, as he admits that Anne was just a rebound, we have no idea how much time has passed, whether his affair with Anne was brief or lengthy.
In this cafe scene, Suzanne is engaged to Jean-Pierre; in the next, she is a married woman. Her brother, Robert, is also married, and we might again wonder how much we have missed as the story relies on dialogue to convey to us information we haven’t at all witnessed. Neither his nor Suzanne’s wedding has been dramatised, and yet this isn’t because Pialat isn’t interested in set-pieces, he just prefers those that can generate the most inexplicability, and none more so than in this penultimate scene that takes up fifteen minutes of screen time. Here, there are tensions aplenty as Robert tells his brother-in-law to smell Suzanne’s skin. But this isn’t brother-in-law, Jean-Pierre, it is his wife’s brother, whom he asks to take a sniff at Suzanne. This comes after Jean-Pierre asks his wife’s brother if he is jealous of his sister’s husband, just as Robert is jealous of him. There is also tension between Jean-Pierre and this brother-in-law when they get into an argument over art, and a surprise for everybody when Suzanne and Robert’s father turns up so unexpectedly that it was information supposedly kept from the cast, who had to improvise around it.
What all this shows is that Pialat is a realist of a certain type, a naturalist with a particular fascination with human behaviour. Often, naturalism and realism are used interchangeably, partly because perhaps Emile Zola’s work could be seen as exemplifying both. Zola wanted to pay close attention to the reality of the events he depicted, and anybody reading Germinal will remember vividly the mines Zola details with such horror, and with an equal attention George Orwell brings when essayistically addressing mine workers in The Road to Wigan Pier. Yet Zola was also a naturalist in his exploration of human psychology through behavioural traits that were genealogically determined, leaving characterisation simple and typological. As Leonard Tancock says in his introduction to La Bete Humaine: ‘‘...subtle analysis of character is not one of Zola’s interests or objects. On the contrary, he is at pains to show that in the modern world the mass, the crowd, is more significant than the individual, and that herd instincts and what is now called mass psychology are depriving modern man of the means or even the will to think and act for himself.’’ Zola himself sought a ‘‘literature governed by science,’’ and reckoned ‘‘it is necessary to start from the determinism of inanimate bodies in order to arrive at the determinism of living beings.’’ (‘The Experimental Novel’)
Pialat may share with Zola a resistance to conventional psychology, and both might see that what matters more are animal drives than motivated behaviour. But while Zola couches this in the explicable as families are driven collectively by lust, alcoholism, murderous desire and so on, Pialat might be closer to the vitalistic, and contrary to Zola, taking into account Nasrullah Mabrol’s claim that ‘‘such an attitude is directly opposed to attitudes such as vitalism, which [in Zola’s words] ‘consider life as a mysterious and supernatural agent, which acts arbitrarily, free from all determinism.’” (Literary Criticism and Theory)
Pialat wants to resist cause and effect, and this is partly why we have made much of his elliptical approach to causality, exemplified in a statement made by his frequent editor, Yann Dedet. Quoted in an interview in the DVD featurette, The Human Eye, he says that Pialat ‘‘usually throws out bad scenes, even if they’re important plot-wise, so sometimes there are holes in the plot.” This would seem the opposite of determinism, as though Pialat wanted the drive of the naturalistic but without the determinacy Zola sought. Why does the daughter sleep with various young men? Why does she cry when she returns home after sleeping with the American boy that means she has cheated on Luc? She says, ‘‘I didn’t know what I was doing?’’ and adds ‘‘I’m sick of it.’’ Zola’s characters may not quite know why they are doing things either, but the novelist has some notion and will generate causality to reveal it. When Suzanne tells her brother about wishing to go to boarding school, she says that the only time she is happy is when she is with a guy, and adds that she has considered killing herself. She is a creature of impulses rather than a figure of motivations, and this could well describe many a character in a Pialat work, and a number of them here. If the dinner party is so chaotic, it rests on these impulses becoming pronounced without one being able to claim strategic purposes to the characters’ actions. Sure, when Suzanne allows one of her former lovers, Michel, to put his hand on her knee at the gathering, this will be the man that she will go off with to San Diego in the closing scene. But we might believe she could have gone off with any number of men, and the dinner scene is complicated by her fondly kissing her husband moments after this knee-fondling, and with Jean-Pierre showing such affection back that Suzanne’s brother tells everyone he doesn’t like the way he paws at his sister; that he has dirty hands.
Then, of course, there is the father, who turns up and announces he is selling the house, and not long afterwards tells the wife he has long since left to go into the kitchen: an act of patriarchy bad enough in a man who rules the roost; almost surreally insensitive coming from a man who has flown the nest. When Jean-Pierre says that Suzanne loves her father, the dad says Suzanne loves everyone, and yet she wishes him dead. In the closing sequence, she and her father are together as he sees her off at the airport. If someone wishes to claim that the dinner party scenes leads us to assume she will go off with Michel, it hardly leads us to expect she will be seen off by the father she wishes dead. The father insists the mother go into the kitchen after she slaps him out of nowhere, even if we might feel it is entirely understandable that an ex who turns up out of the blue and wishes to sell the house, insults his daughter and claims everybody wishes him dead, wouldn’t be undeserving of the slap he receives. He is the most infuriating of interlopers, even if he does happen to own the place.
Partly what makes Pialat’s work so tense is that though people are wilful, they are rarely reasonable, as if their wills are adrift from their rational wants. It is one thing that the father wishes to sell the house, but another that he turns up as he does and announces it. Early in the film, Suzanne says to her father friends are coming round. ‘‘You do it once more and I’ll strangle you’’ he says, pointing a finger at her, while Suzanne smiles, before he hits her with the back of his hand. It comes as a horrible surprise, partly because it sounds like an exaggerated admonition that Suzanne meets with that smile, and also because nothing in his behaviour up until this point makes the slap likely. Also, when they initially talk, he is working on cutting material for an item: he works as a furrier and the business is in the family’s large home. Other employees are there and witness this domestic situation. Nothing is calibrated and controlled, deliberate and purposeful in Pialat’s films, and one can think of the messiness of emotional entanglements in Loulou, especially a late scene when the titular character takes his lover to meet his family, and in Passe ton bac d'abord, where we try and work out the various relationships taking place amongst the teenagers.
But there are any number of such scenes in Pialat’s cinema because this is what the work is ‘about’: a chaos of the emotions. It is the same here when there is a party at a friend’s place. Suzanne watches as her apparent boyfriend Bernard and Anne start kissing and go off into another room, and then shortly after that we see him going to kiss Suzanne, with the friend looking on, just as earlier Suzanne had looked on at the guy kissing Anne. Eventually, Suzanne and Bernard end up in bed together. This emotional messiness is matched by the form: when she leaves the flat to go out, and her mother gives her a disapproving look, we might assume she is going off to this party. But the clothes she wears as she leaves are different from those she is wearing when she arrives, as we realise this must be a different party, a different occasion, or assume it is a continuity error; a variation of the plot hole Dedet discusses above.
What is clear is that Pialat pushes certain questions of realism further than almost any filmmaker before him, if we accept Andre Bazin’s claim that ‘‘realism in art can only be achieved in one way. – through artifice.’ (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Part of this artifice has often rested on generating a plot out of circumstances that would be deemed realistic, with Bicycle Thieves capturing everyday life in Rome, but also insisting on a story that has a clear drive – the central characters buy a bike for work, it is stolen, and he spends much of the film searching for it. The film has the inciting incident beloved of screenwriting gurus, for all its realist elements. A Nos amours has no such inciting incident, and nobody will doubt that Antonio Ricci knows what he wants: to get his bike back. Bazin speaks of the ‘‘effectiveness of his [the director’s] chosen form of reality’’ (What is Cinema? Vol. II), aware that it needn’t take one particular form as he can see a large difference between Citizen Kane and Italian neo-realism. It is as though Pialat’s realist project is predicated on behavioural ambiguity and insists on formal procedures to bring this out, in an editing style that wrong-foots the viewer when trying to comprehend cause and effect. As Isabelle Huppert puts it in an Interview on the Artificial Eye DVD of Loulou: he has no interest in typical transitions.
It was as if, Bonnaire says in The Human Eye, ‘‘I’d unconsciously wanted someone to tell my own story…’’ but this isn’t a Freudian demand to bring to the surface what is hidden, but to allow the unconscious to continue as a drive that needn’t be understood, though whose features are comprehended. This may partly be where the music comes in, with Pialat having little interest in the sort of non-diegetic score that is often underscoring: reflecting a given mood or state that becomes all the more emphatically clear as it joyously or sadly captures the feeling of joy or sadness. This is tautological emotion, with the character and the music doubly making clear what someone is going through. In A nos amour, Purcell’s ‘The Cold Song’, performed by Klaus Nomi (who died at 39, the year of the film’s release), we hear the music three times: over the opening credits, after Luc insults Suzanne when he is with Anne, and over the closing credits. It removes the film from its realist assumptions – where non-diegetic music would often be anathema to a realism that relies on diegetic sound. Yet it gives the work its emphatically ambiguous centre, leaving us adrift in the incoherence of the will but aware, too, of the texture of complex affect.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

A Nos Amours

Adrift in the Incoherence of the Will

Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours is a slippery account of a teenage girl’s awakening, played by an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire, who can look like she is barely into adolescence or well into her twenties, depending on the expression on her face and the situation in which she finds herself. In one scene, Suzanne is talking to her father (played by Pialat), and he asks her about her dimples and says she used to have two and now she only one, as she could be fourteen. Later in the film, when her first love Luc says he still loves her and wants them to try again, she could be ten years older. She tells Luc she has changed and she doesn’t know if she can be happy again as she was when they were young and holidaying in the Alps. He tells her he will make her fifteen again. She replies, saying, ‘‘I’m not fifteen anymore.’’ How old she is, we cannot quite say, as Pialat insists on radical transitions that leave us unsure how much time has passed since the film began. We do know at the start, she is sixteen, and the moment she references when she was happy in the Alps isn’t a comment about anything we have witnessed. When she speaks of her happiness before, we have to take her word for it; we only have evidence of her unhappiness from sixteen onwards as she breaks up with Luc and takes up with various lovers she hopes will be resolved by marrying Jean-Pierre – played by the Cyril Collard, who was ten years older than Bonnaire, but looks like he could be around twenty.
Pialat’s work often focuses on the intensity of situations and the ambiguous nature of a person’s motivations, all of which are exacerbated by radical transitions that leave the viewer trying to comprehend not only what the characters feel, but also how the event fits within the narrative's cause and effect. To explain the originality of Pialat’s project, to comprehend the ambiguities he insists upon and the intensities he seeks, we can work through various scenes in the film, including the ones above. How would a filmmaker who seeks to clarify a feeling usually do so? When Suzanne says she was happy at fifteen, the filmmaker would have probably offered this scene either as a prologue or as a flashback. The viewer could match Suzanne’s assumptions with prior evidence, as we recall that moment in the Alps, or with a flashback informing us of how she felt, or perhaps both if the director doesn’t want to leave much ambiguity, or wishes to create it by forcing us to recognise a mismatch between how Suzanne remembers the events we have witnessed. The film could have simply chosen a flashback that would leave us wondering if she is offering a subjective account as she wishes to remember it more positively in her now disillusioned state. Instead, it remains an enigmatic remark and all the more so when Suzanne says that she was so happy in the Alps that she wanted to die with Luc on the toboggan. Is she being melodramatic or registering how unhappy she has been in the intervening period? We cannot say, as Pialat insists, we take it at face value: in the expression on her visage.
Halfway through the film, after her father has left home and her mother has difficulty coping, Suzanne tells her older brother that she wants to leave home too and go to boarding school. The film cuts to her in a Paris boutique, and she sees her friend Anne with Luc. They are now a couple, and the exchange between Anne and Suzanne reveals that she has been at boarding school for a while. If it weren’t for this dialogue exchange, we might have assumed it was the day after her discussion with her brother as the film elides her arrival at the school and her stay there. We could also wonder how long Anne and Luc have been together, and how besotted Anne is with a young man who still seems in love with his ex. Earlier in the film, Luc shows up in a cafe and Suzanne is there with some friends, including Anne. Luc asks to speak to Suzanne, they go outside and Anne follows them out, with another friend saying she is on heat, and is after Luc. Suzanne says that after Luc says he loves her and tries to kiss her, she will never be with him; that he only wants to sleep with her because she has slept with other guys. The film cuts to Anne looking on, and after Suzanne walks off, Anne enters the frame and says Luc should ‘snap out of it.’ The next time we see Anne and Luc together is in the boutique, and now a couple. When in the cafe scene quoted above, Luc suggests once again they should get back together, as he admits that Anne was just a rebound, we have no idea how much time has passed, whether his affair with Anne was brief or lengthy.
In this cafe scene, Suzanne is engaged to Jean-Pierre; in the next, she is a married woman. Her brother, Robert, is also married, and we might again wonder how much we have missed as the story relies on dialogue to convey to us information we haven’t at all witnessed. Neither his nor Suzanne’s wedding has been dramatised, and yet this isn’t because Pialat isn’t interested in set-pieces, he just prefers those that can generate the most inexplicability, and none more so than in this penultimate scene that takes up fifteen minutes of screen time. Here, there are tensions aplenty as Robert tells his brother-in-law to smell Suzanne’s skin. But this isn’t brother-in-law, Jean-Pierre, it is his wife’s brother, whom he asks to take a sniff at Suzanne. This comes after Jean-Pierre asks his wife’s brother if he is jealous of his sister’s husband, just as Robert is jealous of him. There is also tension between Jean-Pierre and this brother-in-law when they get into an argument over art, and a surprise for everybody when Suzanne and Robert’s father turns up so unexpectedly that it was information supposedly kept from the cast, who had to improvise around it.
What all this shows is that Pialat is a realist of a certain type, a naturalist with a particular fascination with human behaviour. Often, naturalism and realism are used interchangeably, partly because perhaps Emile Zola’s work could be seen as exemplifying both. Zola wanted to pay close attention to the reality of the events he depicted, and anybody reading Germinal will remember vividly the mines Zola details with such horror, and with an equal attention George Orwell brings when essayistically addressing mine workers in The Road to Wigan Pier. Yet Zola was also a naturalist in his exploration of human psychology through behavioural traits that were genealogically determined, leaving characterisation simple and typological. As Leonard Tancock says in his introduction to La Bete Humaine: ‘‘...subtle analysis of character is not one of Zola’s interests or objects. On the contrary, he is at pains to show that in the modern world the mass, the crowd, is more significant than the individual, and that herd instincts and what is now called mass psychology are depriving modern man of the means or even the will to think and act for himself.’’ Zola himself sought a ‘‘literature governed by science,’’ and reckoned ‘‘it is necessary to start from the determinism of inanimate bodies in order to arrive at the determinism of living beings.’’ (‘The Experimental Novel’)
Pialat may share with Zola a resistance to conventional psychology, and both might see that what matters more are animal drives than motivated behaviour. But while Zola couches this in the explicable as families are driven collectively by lust, alcoholism, murderous desire and so on, Pialat might be closer to the vitalistic, and contrary to Zola, taking into account Nasrullah Mabrol’s claim that ‘‘such an attitude is directly opposed to attitudes such as vitalism, which [in Zola’s words] ‘consider life as a mysterious and supernatural agent, which acts arbitrarily, free from all determinism.’” (Literary Criticism and Theory)
Pialat wants to resist cause and effect, and this is partly why we have made much of his elliptical approach to causality, exemplified in a statement made by his frequent editor, Yann Dedet. Quoted in an interview in the DVD featurette, The Human Eye, he says that Pialat ‘‘usually throws out bad scenes, even if they’re important plot-wise, so sometimes there are holes in the plot.” This would seem the opposite of determinism, as though Pialat wanted the drive of the naturalistic but without the determinacy Zola sought. Why does the daughter sleep with various young men? Why does she cry when she returns home after sleeping with the American boy that means she has cheated on Luc? She says, ‘‘I didn’t know what I was doing?’’ and adds ‘‘I’m sick of it.’’ Zola’s characters may not quite know why they are doing things either, but the novelist has some notion and will generate causality to reveal it. When Suzanne tells her brother about wishing to go to boarding school, she says that the only time she is happy is when she is with a guy, and adds that she has considered killing herself. She is a creature of impulses rather than a figure of motivations, and this could well describe many a character in a Pialat work, and a number of them here. If the dinner party is so chaotic, it rests on these impulses becoming pronounced without one being able to claim strategic purposes to the characters’ actions. Sure, when Suzanne allows one of her former lovers, Michel, to put his hand on her knee at the gathering, this will be the man that she will go off with to San Diego in the closing scene. But we might believe she could have gone off with any number of men, and the dinner scene is complicated by her fondly kissing her husband moments after this knee-fondling, and with Jean-Pierre showing such affection back that Suzanne’s brother tells everyone he doesn’t like the way he paws at his sister; that he has dirty hands.
Then, of course, there is the father, who turns up and announces he is selling the house, and not long afterwards tells the wife he has long since left to go into the kitchen: an act of patriarchy bad enough in a man who rules the roost; almost surreally insensitive coming from a man who has flown the nest. When Jean-Pierre says that Suzanne loves her father, the dad says Suzanne loves everyone, and yet she wishes him dead. In the closing sequence, she and her father are together as he sees her off at the airport. If someone wishes to claim that the dinner party scenes leads us to assume she will go off with Michel, it hardly leads us to expect she will be seen off by the father she wishes dead. The father insists the mother go into the kitchen after she slaps him out of nowhere, even if we might feel it is entirely understandable that an ex who turns up out of the blue and wishes to sell the house, insults his daughter and claims everybody wishes him dead, wouldn’t be undeserving of the slap he receives. He is the most infuriating of interlopers, even if he does happen to own the place.
Partly what makes Pialat’s work so tense is that though people are wilful, they are rarely reasonable, as if their wills are adrift from their rational wants. It is one thing that the father wishes to sell the house, but another that he turns up as he does and announces it. Early in the film, Suzanne says to her father friends are coming round. ‘‘You do it once more and I’ll strangle you’’ he says, pointing a finger at her, while Suzanne smiles, before he hits her with the back of his hand. It comes as a horrible surprise, partly because it sounds like an exaggerated admonition that Suzanne meets with that smile, and also because nothing in his behaviour up until this point makes the slap likely. Also, when they initially talk, he is working on cutting material for an item: he works as a furrier and the business is in the family’s large home. Other employees are there and witness this domestic situation. Nothing is calibrated and controlled, deliberate and purposeful in Pialat’s films, and one can think of the messiness of emotional entanglements in Loulou, especially a late scene when the titular character takes his lover to meet his family, and in Passe ton bac d'abord, where we try and work out the various relationships taking place amongst the teenagers.
But there are any number of such scenes in Pialat’s cinema because this is what the work is ‘about’: a chaos of the emotions. It is the same here when there is a party at a friend’s place. Suzanne watches as her apparent boyfriend Bernard and Anne start kissing and go off into another room, and then shortly after that we see him going to kiss Suzanne, with the friend looking on, just as earlier Suzanne had looked on at the guy kissing Anne. Eventually, Suzanne and Bernard end up in bed together. This emotional messiness is matched by the form: when she leaves the flat to go out, and her mother gives her a disapproving look, we might assume she is going off to this party. But the clothes she wears as she leaves are different from those she is wearing when she arrives, as we realise this must be a different party, a different occasion, or assume it is a continuity error; a variation of the plot hole Dedet discusses above.
What is clear is that Pialat pushes certain questions of realism further than almost any filmmaker before him, if we accept Andre Bazin’s claim that ‘‘realism in art can only be achieved in one way. – through artifice.’ (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Part of this artifice has often rested on generating a plot out of circumstances that would be deemed realistic, with Bicycle Thieves capturing everyday life in Rome, but also insisting on a story that has a clear drive – the central characters buy a bike for work, it is stolen, and he spends much of the film searching for it. The film has the inciting incident beloved of screenwriting gurus, for all its realist elements. A Nos amours has no such inciting incident, and nobody will doubt that Antonio Ricci knows what he wants: to get his bike back. Bazin speaks of the ‘‘effectiveness of his [the director’s] chosen form of reality’’ (What is Cinema? Vol. II), aware that it needn’t take one particular form as he can see a large difference between Citizen Kane and Italian neo-realism. It is as though Pialat’s realist project is predicated on behavioural ambiguity and insists on formal procedures to bring this out, in an editing style that wrong-foots the viewer when trying to comprehend cause and effect. As Isabelle Huppert puts it in an Interview on the Artificial Eye DVD of Loulou: he has no interest in typical transitions.
It was as if, Bonnaire says in The Human Eye, ‘‘I’d unconsciously wanted someone to tell my own story…’’ but this isn’t a Freudian demand to bring to the surface what is hidden, but to allow the unconscious to continue as a drive that needn’t be understood, though whose features are comprehended. This may partly be where the music comes in, with Pialat having little interest in the sort of non-diegetic score that is often underscoring: reflecting a given mood or state that becomes all the more emphatically clear as it joyously or sadly captures the feeling of joy or sadness. This is tautological emotion, with the character and the music doubly making clear what someone is going through. In A nos amour, Purcell’s ‘The Cold Song’, performed by Klaus Nomi (who died at 39, the year of the film’s release), we hear the music three times: over the opening credits, after Luc insults Suzanne when he is with Anne, and over the closing credits. It removes the film from its realist assumptions – where non-diegetic music would often be anathema to a realism that relies on diegetic sound. Yet it gives the work its emphatically ambiguous centre, leaving us adrift in the incoherence of the will but aware, too, of the texture of complex affect.

© Tony McKibbin