Sight&Sound - 11.2019

(John Hannent) #1
44 | Sight&Sound | November 2019

Within French cinema, Pialat has been
on occasion compared to Robert Bresson,
whose Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Mouchette
(1967) were also adapted from Bernanos novels,
and it’s true there is a defiant rigour and refusal
of affect in their films that brings them close.
But even though Pialat had early aspirations to
be a painter – and exhibitions of his work, quasi
post-impressionist, largely figurative and bold in
colour, have been held since his death – there is
little sense of Bresson’s precise framing in his work.
Nor is there any of the reduction of his ‘actors’
to simple gestures and a monotone delivery of
lines. In L’Enfance nue, as well as the glorious (and
only recently available again) television series
La Maison des bois (The House in the Woods, 1971),
about children packed off to the countryside
during World War I, Pialat was dealing with
kids untutored in filmmaking or acting, and
this spilled into his casting of the adults. Later
on, when he made Passe ton bac d’abord (Graduate
First, 1978), a quick solution to using up funds
from an abandoned project, Pialat returned to
the town of Lens, and his research among the
youth living there led to their recruitment as
actors. In that film, which deals compassionately
with the limited options available to provincial
school-leavers, he even used the conversations
held in cafés as the basis of the script.
But for his second feature, We Won’t Grow Old
Together (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, 1972),
Pialat cast two of the most popular stars of
French cinema at that time. Marlène Jobert was
best known for light comedy, but she was living
then with Claude Berri – a close friend of Pialat
from the days before he became a successful
director himself – and was open to a different
way of working. Jean Yanne had just acted in
Claude Chabrol’s The Beast Must Die (Que la bête
meure, 1969), in which Pialat had played a police
inspector. The screenplay began as a novel by
Pialat himself, a completely autobiographical
story of the tortuous relationship between a
television director and his lover. Composed
largely of an unremitting sequence of arguments
held inside cars and hotel rooms, the film was

a box-office success in France, embraced by
audiences for all the reasons that might have
been expected to repulse them. The shoot was
as fraught as its subject, with Pialat and Yanne
descending to screaming matches; at one point
the production was almost closed down. Jobert
has recalled that the actor had problems with
the boorish nature of the Pialat substitute he was
required to play, while she felt the masochistic
side to her character was defensible. Like many
called upon to comment on Pialat, she found that
he absolutely relied on tension and conflict to
function, and that the swift transitions between
calm and violence in the script were constantly

mirrored by the climate on the set. For Pialat,
she observed, “Nothing was more authentic
than his own life” – and he was as unsparing
with himself as he was with his collaborators.
Similar incidents were reported in the making
of Loulou (1980), in which Pialat had the support
of Gaumont to hire Depardieu and Huppert, two
of the most bankable French names around. Pialat
even disappeared from the shoot for three days,
according to Huppert, such were the growing
antagonisms, mainly with the male actors;
television footage from the set shows Pialat in a
very argumentative frame of mind. Depardieu,
playing the minor criminal who gives Huppert’s
character sexual satisfaction way beyond that in
her bourgeois marriage, became very irritated
by Pialat’s needling and prevarications. It was
only after seeing the completed film that he
realised just what Pialat had achieved, and
offered himself up to act for him again. Huppert
relished the freedom she found with Pialat; in a
café scene, she and Depardieu never heard the
words ‘action’ or ‘cut’, but instinctively felt the
camera was on and just slipped into the dialogue
of their characters, so that “the fiction lodged
itself in the heart of reality”. This is a well-known
technique employed by Ken Loach, and indeed
some comparisons have been made between the
British ‘realist’ and Pialat. But while Loach rarely
creates a scene without a political subtext, in
Pialat such issues as class warfare and economic
deprivation are there as the brute matter of life
rather than an ideological motor for the narrative.
More than Loach, the usual connection made
is between Pialat and John Cassavetes, who
also walked a creative tightrope between total
independence and working with the studios,
and dealt with people and milieux rarely given
space in mainstream cinema. Where the two
come close is in creating a sense that the actors
are improvising their dialogue, where in fact
what ends up on screen was mainly derived from
their scripts, with adjustments made during the
filming (both Huppert and Jobert have testified to
this in the case of Pialat). But there is a significant

Two for the road: Sandrine Bonnaire made her electrifying debut in A nos amours (1983)

A thief in the night: Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in Loulou (1980)

Depardieu became irritated by

Pialat’s needling. It was only after

seeing the film that he realised

what Pialat had achieved

DEEP FOCUS MAURICE PIALAT


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VERSION Deep Focus, 3

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