Sight&Sound - 11.2019

November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 45

cultural gap between the peculiarly American

energy of the characters in Cassavetes’s films and

the wayward, often abusive behaviour unveiled

in those of Pialat. Cassavetes was immersed

in his own version of Method acting and built

up his films through workshops and intensive

rehearsals. Pialat’s own involvement with theatre

included some amateur experiences when young

and taking on small parts in classics in the mid-

1950s, but when it came to the cinema, what

rehearsal he felt was necessary happened on set.

Above all, Pialat expected his actors to enter into

a dramatic situation through their own instincts,

embrace the moment, and offer him something

he hadn’t expected. (Robert Altman worked with

a similar attitude, but with greater patience.)

The most striking examples of this occur in A

nos amours (1983), the film in which the director

discovered Sandrine Bonnaire, whose total ease

before the camera and natural magnetism made

her the perfect Pialat actress. She was cast as

Suzanne, a promiscuous teenager who slides from

one lover to another without ever feeling she

has found the right man. The screenplay was by

Arlette Langmann, sister of director Claude Berri

and one-time partner of Pialat, whose own life

experience had already provided the triangular

situation in Loulou. Like Pialat, she was not afraid

of autobiography as the truest subject for a film.

Pialat cast himself as Suzanne’s father, and one

of the sweetest scenes he ever filmed consists of

him alone with Bonnaire, commenting on how

she once had two dimples on her face, and that

now one has vanished. This was not scripted,

and neither was the extraordinary engagement

dinner when the family were joined by a guest

played by the film critic (and later scriptwriter

for Pialat) Jacques Fieschi. Up until that day,

according to the screenplay, the father had

disappeared, presumed dead. But after informing

only key members of the crew, Pialat appeared

to join the table in character, and improvised a

discussion. He taunted Fieschi about an interview

his character was supposed to have published, in

which Suzanne’s brother had been denigrated. In

fact, this was a reference to a real interview which

Fieschi had conducted with the cinematographer

Pierre-William Glenn, who had worked with

Pialat on two films and found his methods

insupportable (many of Pialat’s films ended up

being shot and edited by several people, though

it’s hard to say who did what). Fieschi had to deal

on camera with his genuine embarrassment at

this challenge, while Evelyne Ker, who played the

mother, had at this point become so fed up with

Pialat she just slapped him – both for real and in

character. All of this was used in the final edit.

None of this of course needs to be known

by the spectator of the film, and indeed only

those who have researched Pialat – and there is

relatively little written in the English language –

would have any idea about it. All that matters is

that the authenticity of the moment is tangible,

while the method remains invisible. How many

directors could succeed in showing a death by

cancer in La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape,

1974) or the struggles of a tortured artist in Va n

Gogh and not lapse into bad taste or melodrama?

In Pialat’s last and least-seen film, Le Garçu

(1995), Depardieu is the estranged father of a

young boy, who was played by the director’s only

son, Antoine, aged four. The film is somewhat

broken-backed, and Pialat had hoped to re-edit it

at some stage (a long illness leading to his death

in 2003 prevented this). But it is clear that he

took a real pleasure in the filming of Antoine,

and Le Garçu stands as a response to the sadness

of the orphan in L’Enfance nue, so creating a kind

of blessed arc to a troubled career. Once again

Pialat enjoys the innocent gaze he had found in

the Lumière films, an attitude that often carries

such an emotional charge it is little wonder

French cinema was changed by his example.

The S&S Deep Focus season ‘Maurice

Pialat and the New French Realism’

screens at BFI Southbank, London, from

14 October until the end of December

Police (1985) We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972)

The devil’s advocate: Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan (1987) L’Enfance nue (1968)

La Gueule ouverte (1974)

In Pialat class warfare and

economic deprivation are there

as the brute matter of life rather

than an ideological motor

A RT

PRODUCTION

CLIENT

SUBS

REPRO OP

VERSION Deep Focus, 4