L'Amour Existe

Love may exist, but there's not much sign of it in the cold-eyed loathing with which Pialat depicts life in the Parisian suburbs. A brief evocation of his own pre-war childhood in the banlieue, precedes his portrait the contemporary reality: the concrete slabs ('barracks'), noise and squalor, violent teenagers with little to look forward to, bored pensioners ('people who are paid to be old') with even less, dozens of tumbledown shacks 'three kilometres from the Champs-Elysees' full of impoverished Algerians. Let's face it, Pialat is a miserable old sod at the best of times, but this hard little jewel of a documentary, perceptively shot and scored, is entirely persuasive.