In the November 2019 issue of Sight & Sound, Olivier Assayas had this to say about the filmmaker Maurice Pialat: “For my generation,” he was “a much stronger reference than a lot of nouvelle vague filmmakers.” (Arnaud Desplechin has expressed similar sentiments.) Invoking, quite rightly, comparisons with the discomforting, revolutionary cinema of John Casavettes, Assayas explained how Pialat “did not respect the rules of classic narrative . . . the important thing was to capture the rawness of the performance.” Now, we had always taken Pialat seriously, but this got our attention, as did the following comment from the same interview: “I mean the fact that a work as important Maison des Bois had not been recognized at the time, not at all . . . now seems astonishing.”
A bootleg copy of Maison des Bois (The House in the Woods—a serial that was presented in seven fifty-minute installments for French television in 1971) had been languishing unwatched on our impossibly towering “to watch” stack for years. It quickly jumped to the front of the line, and, once behind us, left only one Pialat left unseen: his final film, Le Garcu, Pialat’s fourth collaboration with Gerard Depardieu. So now we have seen them all—the features, that is. Pialat’s career got off to a very slow start. A generational contemporary of the New-Wavers, Pialat made a dozen short films in the sixties while others secured the financing that allowed them to crank out feature after feature. Pialat was a notoriously difficult and apparently bitter man, and by all accounts felt snubbed by his more successful would-be peers. We weren’t there, but François Truffaut helped produced his first feature, the celebrated L’Enfance Nue (a film that can be seen as a repudiation of the implicit sentimentality of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows), and Claude Chabrol cast him in his excellent The Beast Must Die. (Pialat gives a fine, restrained performance. He was a very capable actor, though, as with many accomplished directors-as-actors – Sydney Pollack comes to mind – played within a relatively narrow range).
We are especially fond of five of Pialat’s films, discussed here in chronological order; our “user’s guide” to all of his movies can be found below.
La Maison des Bois. The “house in the woods” refers to the dwelling of a gamekeeper and his wife, in a provincial town towards the end of World War I, which, like many others, served as a modest foster home for children evacuated from Paris during that epic conflict. (The advancing German army had come as close as forty miles to the capital.) Maison is slow, observational, and atypical for the director, but it is subtly spellbinding, capturing a moment, a time, a place, a nation – and, without pausing to lecture, a class and social structure – that seem so real you can almost touch it. The only Pialat film that could be called humanist, it is distinguished by moving, small pieces of business rather than dramatic flourishes.
Maurice Pialat as the Schoolteacher in La Maison des Bois
La Gueule Ouverte (The Mouth Agape). Pialat’s next feature was We Won’t Grow Old Together, featuring extraordinary performances by Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne as a couple viciously arguing out the last stages of their marriage. It is not easy to watch, nor is it pleasant to learn that the story is purportedly autobiographical. By one account “the shoot was as fraught as its subject, with Pialat and Yanne descending in to screaming matches,” arguments rooted in Yanne’s difficulty in coming to terms with “the boorish nature of the Pialat substitute he was supposed to play.” Pialat’s subsequent film, La Gueule Ouverte, is also challenging (and also littered with autobiographical references), but in this case it is original, thoughtful, and rewarding—and perhaps here is the template for all the films that would follow, with imperfect characters observed unflinchingly but without judgment in difficult situations. In this instance that situation is a mother dying from cancer, as husband, son, and daughter-in-law (Nathalie Baye) drift in and out of their responsibilities. Beautifully shot by Néstor Almendros, it is not what you would call an evening’s entertainment (the very loose comparison would be Bergman’s Cries and Whispers), but it is a thoughtful movie worth watching.
A Nos Amours. The decade that followed Ouverte was a relatively quiet one for the director. It would be five years before his next feature, Passe ton Bac d’abord, (Graduate First), which has its defenders, but we found meandering. (Our notes, which almost always emphasize the positive, conclude with “if he’s going to be a difficult misanthrope, he needs to make better movies.”) Loulou, which arrived the following year, was indeed a much better film, with notable performances by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu. But it was with A Nos Amours that Pialat fully hit his stride. Written by Arlette Langmann, who also wrote L’Enfance Nue and Loulou, A Nos Amours centers on the story of Suzanne, a girl with considerably more than her share of wild oats to sow (portrayed by sixteen-year old Sandrine Bonnaire in her shimmering, brilliant, career-making debut), as well as her dysfunctional family. If We Won’t Grow Old is reminiscent of your least favorite Casavettes film, Amours is a tribute to the cinema of discomfort. When Pialat, playing the role of the father, turns up unexpectedly at dinner, you have no idea what is going to happen next. (Neither did the cast, apparently, who were also surprised by the appearance.) But despite all the emotional violence that follows, what lingers after the credits is what the New Yorker’s Richard Brody described as “one of the cinema’s greatest depictions of a father-daughter relationship.”
Pialat with Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nos Amours
Police. Our favorite Pialat is this excellent police procedural, starring Depardieu and Sophie Marceau (Sandrine Bonnaire is on hand as well), in this savvy drama featuring compromised cops, conflict-of-interest ridden lawyers, Tunisian drug dealers, and, of course, the navigation of complex social relations throughout, with much observed and little settled. Most films mining this genre reach for violence as an easy way to resolve the story at the end; Pialat, of course, isn’t shopping for that sort of certainty, and in so doing, and throughout, reminds us that the threat of violence is much more dramatically interesting than its exercise (and exploitation). The uncompromising writer-director Catherine Breillat wrote the first draft; not surprisingly, they argued a bit over subsequent revisions. Police is one of those movies that gets better and better.
Sous Le Soleil De Satan. Pialat’s last great film, Under the Sun of Satan reunited the director with Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire; Pialat also cast himself in an important role. Beautifully and thoughtfully shot, Soleil De Satan takes on big issues (Depardieu is a troubled priest, Bonnaire has murdered one of her lovers). This is very much the territory of novelist Georges Bernanos, who also wrote the source material for Robert Bresson’s masterpieces Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette (Bonnaire’s character is called Mouchette—take that as a warning). The movie took home the grand prize at Cannes, which was a wildly controversial choice, so much so that the director shared this thought to those jeering in the audience: “if you don’t like me, I can tell you that I don’t like you either.”
Gerard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonniare in Sous Le Soleil De Satan
Pialat’s next film would be the biopic Van Gogh, which has some great moments, but one can’t help suspect that the portrayal of the great artist as sort of a jerk who was hard to get along with but was really misunderstood and underappreciated might have been more about the movie’s director than its subject. In the words of Kent Jones, “To say that Pialat marched to the beat of a different drummer is to put it mildly. In fact, he didn’t really march at all. He ambled, and fuck anybody who got it into their head that they’d like to amble along with him. Or behind him. Or ahead of him.” So perhaps Pialat was not the ideal dinner guest. But his was a distinct cinematic voice, and he left us some very fine films that will long endure.
The Feature Films of Maurice Pialat: A User’s Guide
L’Enfance Nue (1968) *
La Maison des Bois(1971) **
We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972)
The Mouth Agape (1974) **
Passe ton Bac d’abord (1978)
Loulou (1980) *
A Nos Amours (1983) **
Police (1985) ***
Sous Le Soleil De Satan (1987) **
Van Gogh (1991) *
Le Garcu (1995)