Family Affairs

...Gremlins' battles against furry, fang-toothed creatures that wilt upon exposure to the right anticombatant, as the Wicked Witch of the West did, start to look like child's play...

...But life with her parents and her older brother is a cauldron of pitched emotions...

...Smith's idea of maternal kindness may be Mr...

...The two kids—15 and 10 years old, respectively— arrive at the breakfast table one morning in their cheerful suburban kitchen to find their home opened to a lanky, blue-eyed stranger...

...A Nos Amours is a subtly told story of the conflicts and malaise passed from generation to generation...

...Pace Tolstoy's famous opening line, I don't think that either all happy or all unhappy families resemble one another...

...What is it...

...Hip," as Jake disdainfully informs Sam when he chats them up in the language of the '60s, "isn't hip anymore...

...Then, displaying his brand of bleary-eyed irony, he points out that one of her dimples has vanished...

...Within the boundaries it sets itself—those of a mass-market production aimed at a broad American audience—it is downright surprising: Half sunlit, half scary, this is the real nonescapist article, a welcome relief from the cartoon fantasies Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are peddling...

...Overall, I admired this film—and the high sights of its executive producers, the recently formed team of Stanley Jaffee and Sherry Lansing...

...Tension mounts in Firstborn like a knot at the back of your neck, a clutching feeling in the area of your chest...

...I wish the otherwise able screenwriter, Ron Koslow, had seen fit to place the Livingstons in a larger and more realistic context than their tree-lined street...

...In the main, movies concern themselves with experiences that are hard to misinterpret—sex, violence, occasionally romance—and that are easily flagged by such techniques as tumescence, blood and soft-focus...

...At camp Suzanne evades the longings of her attentive boyfriend, Luc (Cyr Boitard), but loses her virginity to a cocky American drifter she meets in a bar one evening...

...A bit later, the family holds a wedding celebration for Robert, who has gotten married too...

...Amours thrusts a prolific and largely overlooked director (other thanLoulou, none of his earlier works had ever come to my attention) into the front line of filmmakers to watch...

...Once the father departs, the mother collapses into fits of hysteria, ceding ever more authority to Robert, and Suzanne continues to find refuge in sexual encounters...

...It is partly about the contemporary fissured household and the exchange of traditional roles, but it is also trying to convey the pollution of the very idea of family: Sam, for all his lack of principle, is committed—to be sure, in a distorted fashion—to domestic harmony and togetherness...

...The brothers' svelte, cake-baking, slightly fuzzy-headed mom cooks enough food for their army of friends, as she always has...

...In truth, the movie is more complicated than the theme of inverted salvation this image suggests, the child rescuing the parent...

...Of late, though, there has been a flurry of movies willing to explore the more subtle horrors and pleasures of the familial realm...

...The boys' father, a gleaming executive, takes his sons out to dinner and assures them that they can count on him, despite his impending remarriage...

...each has its own nucleus, and each is hard to penetrate, let alone understand...

...Unlike the recent films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, which, I am willing to wager, alienated all except the most diehard and imbecilic of their devotees, A Nos Amours always succeeds in holding your interest...

...They act as though they own the place, are getting very impatient and clearly do not want Jake around...

...It is as close as either of them can come to demonstrating the mutual love they actually feel...

...They contain the white powdery stuff that looks like sugar and is sweeter than gold...

...As we come to recognize the breathtaking quality of her looks (although she is still not the sort of puffily nubile beauty so beloved of "pretty baby" connoisseurs such as David Bailey), we are made to sense the emptiness that physical intimacy momentarily serves to fill...

...Surely this state of cinematic affairs has something to do with the closed nature of the subject, its ultimate opacity...

...thinking back over the past few years, I can recall a handful among the visible, "big" pictures—Kramer vs...

...Sam, you see, is a drug dealer...

...The mother, a reed-thin wreck of a woman, alternately defuses and feeds the atmosphere of tension...

...themoth-er beams proudly at the assembled guests...

...He is a less earnest, Gallic version of John Cassavetes, shrugging instead of shrieking in the face of anguish and mayhem...

...Suzanne is doted upon by her new, very young husband...

...Back in Paris, Suzanne resumes the seemingly unexceptional existence of a teenager: She and her girlfriends have giggly sleep-over dates, and she is an indifferent student...

...Even the fallen, the Sams of this world, have their visions of innocence and glory...

...We sense that something is clearly rotten in the Kingdom of the Livingstons...

...His hostility reveals itself more fully once the father has left the roost and Robert is free to abuse Suzanne physically under cover of disciplining her...

...It is a stunning scene, one of the more delicate moments of truth I can remember having seen in a recent American film...

...Indeed, after a violent chase leading to the retrieval of his drug supply Sam explains to a battered Jake, quietly crying next to him in the car, his hopes for the future...

...In a powerful scene, the father suddenly disrupts the festivities, ostensibly to show the apartment to a potential tenant...

...Moreover, its whimsical feel of reality is an achievement that should be credited to the supremely compositional eye of the director behind the lens, not to the camera's innate authenticity...

...So it is hardly surprising that novelists often seek to "go home" again in their books, to recreate their original attachment or aversion...

...Kramer, Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, Shoot the Moon, and Terms of Endearment...

...Like all reasonable siblings, the boys fight a lot, but they share a j oint suspicion of their mother's romantic choice...

...Robert, Suzanne's effeminate brother, is an aspiring playwright torn between his attraction to his sister and his sadistic inclinations toward her...

...I had other misgivings, as well, mostly about Terri Garr in the mother's role...

...Finally, Suzanne accepts a marriage proposal from a certain Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), one of the many males enticed by her faun-like charms...

...Bye-bye gremlins, bye-bye Darth Vader...

...Neither her beauty nor her intense sexuality is immediately apparent...

...The ads for Firstborn show Jake pinioned, in a crucifix position, across the letters of the title...

...The moment passes...

...Then too, Mr...

...Suzanne seems to accept her father's abandonment with the same impenetrable casualness she exhibits toward other emotional entanglements...

...Jones' notion of claustrophobia—perfumed softness or a giant intrusive breast, depending on whether one follows James Joyce or Philip Roth...

...In the real world some adult observer would almost certainly step forward and alert Wendy to the possibility that she might be harboring a shark...

...The family that snorts together stays together, or some such nonsense...

...If your mother doesn't realize that she's become—as Jake finally has to spell it out—a "coke-head," and her boyfriend is willing to pulverize anyone, no matter how young or weak, who stands in his way, the terror is inside the family...

...Yet here, I find her aura of averageness a distinct disadvantage: Wendy's slow decline is hard to follow, or to care about, because until its onset she has been presented as a mere flakey housewife, a with-it blond-ie...

...Shortly afterwards, Suzanne visits her father and informs him that she is leaving Jean-Pierre to accompany another man to America—the same person we have glimpsed caressing her leg under the table at Robert's party...

...Jake has a lovely, funny girlfriend, and Brian is too much of a cutup in school, but that is merely because he can fight so much better than anyone in his class...

...The style is casual to the point of seeming disheveled, for particular scenes give the impression that they might lead in any of several quite different directions...

...In an understated way, A NosAmours is quite radical: It dares you to take it more seriously than it takes itself...

...Still, these are quibbles...

...During visits on weekends, however, she finds that nothing has changed: She is driven to staying out of the house, and her brother beats her upon her return in the wee hours of the morning...

...Or that Jake can run for his life across the backyards and front lawns of a peaceful surburb at night without causing a neighbor to open a front door or to put on a light...

...When did it disappear, he asks, and why hadn't he noticed sooner—it was his favorite...

...For all its virtues, the details of Firstborn are not carefully worked out...

...Worse, it is inside the heads of the various members of the household...

...The focus is the world perceived by Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 15-year-old attempting to escape her troubling ties at home through increasingly indiscriminate sexual activity...

...For one thing, the thrills and chills are rarely on the surface: The harried-look-ing woman next door may be Mother Goose or Ma Barker, but to find out who she is to her children and husband you would have to go inside...

...Before Tootsie, many people saw her as one of those gifted and adaptable actresses whose almost-pretty presence is all the more interesting because you can never quite remember it...

...Sam tries very hard at the beginning, but Jake (Christopher Collet) and Brian (Corey Haim) are a sophisticated, attuned pair and they aren't buying it...

...It seems strange that nobody, no grandparent or close friend, senses the danger besetting Wendy and her children...

...In the language of the nonhip, he is bad...

...One day, Jake returns from school early and encounters two unexpected men waiting for Sam...

...Maurice Pialat, who directed and also plays a leading role in the film, has managed to bring off the cherished coup of the cinema verite practitioner: simulating the real world as it unfolds without falling into the clutches of the imitative fallacy (making a scene dull because it is built around a dull character...

...Soon thereafter, when he is alone, the teenager acts on a growing hunch and searches the house...

...Suzanne is her father's daughter: The gap she seeks to close is the gap he has left inside her, and like him she can confront the vagaries of longing and discontent only by moving on...

...Furthermore, there is something much too neat about the way Sam manages to infest the waters without encountering the slightest outside interference...

...Increasingly unhappy, she agrees to Robert's suggestion that she attend boarding school...

...What does seem odd to me is the paucity of important movies about domestic matters...

...The father (Maurice Pialat), a bearded furrier who works out of the family apartment, hacking at skins alongside his assistants, is openly restless...

...The most accomplished of these, A NosAmours, was first screened at this fall's New York Film Festival and almost salvaged that otherwise dismal event...

...When we first see her, she is away at summer camp, a straggly haired adolescent with a megawatt smile...

...Suzanne blushes and laughs, delighted by his playful tenderness...

...the viewer discovers them as she herself does...

...Shortly before the father moves out, he and Suzanne have a brief late-night rapprochement...

...With him we discover the root of the problem: Under the closet floorboards of Wendy's—and now Sam's—bedroom, Jake finds a cache of small cellophane bags...

...A different sort of movie about families entirely, Firstborn is more conventionally limned yet shows a fair amount of ambition and skill...

...See this undidactic and clear-eyed picture before it gets yanked off the screen...

...here comes Sam (Peter Weller), the new boyfriend of Wendy (Terri Garr), herself the all-American mother of Jake and Brian Livingston...

...he fights with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and hounds his daughter about her friends and the late hours she keeps...

...Her attitude of noncompliance, of puzzlingly indirect desire, is captured in a few quick strokes that set the pattern for what follows...

...In what is by far the most expressive part of this deliberately cool and unwistful movie, he tells his daughter that he intends to leave...

...The trouble lies elsewhere...

...If it is a cumulatively bleak view of families that Maurice Pialat is presenting, his touch is unfailingly light...