A nos amours/Sous le soleil de Satan

These two movies both find the great French maverick writer-director Maurice Pialat in characteristically uningratiating form, and he appears in both, as does his gifted discovery, Sandrine Bonnaire. A nos amours (To our Romance) is a raw slice of Parisian life in which Pialat plays a middle-aged tailor with a shrewish wife, an obese gay son and a teenage daughter (the stunning debut of Bonnaire) drifting into compulsive promiscuity. Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan's Sun), a Bressonian treatment of a novel by Georges Bernanos set in the1920s, has a performance of power and integrity from Gérard Depardieu as a self-flagellating country priest, who sees the Devil at work in a murderess played by Bonnaire, and encounters Satan in the guise of a horse dealer. When it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes from a jury that included Norman Mailer, Pialat shook his fist at a disapproving audience as he accepted the prize. Both films are in two-disc boxes with invaluable additional material.