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Broken lines, interrupted movements
A ‘warrior of conscience’ at the MFA
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
Related Links

Maurice Pialat's official Web site

Museum of Fine Arts' Film Calendar

Filmmaker Maurice Pialat — "a warrior of conscience, a warrior of truth," in the words of Gˇrard Depardieu, who starred in four Pialat films — isn’t quite an unknown in the United States, but his reputation here is nothing like what it is in his native France, where among filmmakers and critics, it’s heresy to regard him as less than a giant. Organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, this traveling retrospective shows why the French are right.

One of the most startling moments of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble/We Will Not Grow Old Together (1972; March 5 at 3:30 p.m.), one of Pialat’s best films, comes at what should be a climax of the film. (Actually, the film is all climaxes — like each of Pialat’s films, it has a rhythm all its own and imposes particular demands on perception.) Depressed over the disappearance of his mistress, Catherine, the hero, cinematographer Jean (Jean Yanne), is out for a walk with his solicitous wife, Fran¨oise (Macha Mˇril). As they stop outside a tobacco store, Fran¨oise tells Jean that Catherine is going to get married. Fran¨oise waits a moment for his reaction, but he merely shrugs; she goes into the store. Jean continues walking to the corner, then stops and looks past the camera, his face neutral: he seems not to be looking at anything. But now Pialat cuts to a reverse angle of what Jean sees: a city street, parked cars, a few people walking, a few cars passing. The camera returns to Jean; Fran¨oise emerges from the store and they walk a little farther together. "Well, it’s — it’s like a relief," Jean says at last.

The casual cutaway to the street is devastating. As we wait for Jean to react to what he has heard, we get instead this shot that comes like a judgment: Jean’s condemnation of the world, which he faces with detachment, and the world’s condemnation of him, expressed through its indifference. In this naturalistic film, the street cutaway is an eruption of the fantastic, the kind that only Pialat’s personal kind of dramaturgy makes possible.

Because he refuses — in all his films — to force the audience step by step along an external "character arc" (an insulting catch phrase rammed into heads in screenwriting courses), each scene is the new starting point of a new trajectory. A Pialat film is an accumulation of broken lines and interrupted movements. Transitions between scenes create surprise and disruption, as new characters appear without ceremony, and characters we thought we knew reveal hitherto hidden aspects of themselves. In L’enfance nue/Naked Childhood (1969; March 2 at 8:30 p.m.), Pialat’s first feature, 10-year-old Fran¨ois is shown, alternately, as a heartless monster and a person of infinite vulnerability and an ever-misplaced tenderness. The opening scenes of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble suggest that the relationship between Jean and Catherine is stable and harmonious, if a little lacking in warmth; nothing prepares us for the shock of his abusiveness to her in a crowded market. The film is a study in contrasts, in cuts that rejoin the couple just after they’ve separated, in scenes that contradict one another. Pialat supplies no synthesis, only the perpetual destruction of one shot, one situation, by the next. In Loulou (1980; March 4 at 8 p.m.), the progressive cuts in a sequence involving a jealous husband and the wife who’s leaving him lead to a gradual pacification but not to anything that could be called a reconciliation.

In Ė nos amours/To Our Loves (1983; March 11 at 8:15 p.m.), another masterpiece, Pialat’s way of revealing the character of teenage Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire’s film debut) in successive aspects at successive stages of her life, without showing the transitions between the stages, makes it hard to evaluate the seriousness of her various declarations about herself. ("Sometimes I’m sick of living"; "I don’t know whether I’m able to be happy any more.") We come to accept — or rather, we find thrust upon us — a point of view much like that of the adolescent she is, possessed by the emotions of the moment. Two-thirds of the way through Police (1985; March 18 at 8 p.m.), it becomes apparent that the hero, a bullying detective (Depardieu), is an anguished romantic, and the viewer has to re-evaluate his behavior: without warning, the film has jumped ahead in time. Pialat presents a living flux rather than a story.

In the TV mini-series La maison des bois/The House in the Wood (1975; part one: March 12 at 10:30 a.m.; part two: March 19 at 10:30 a.m.), a patient and loving re-creation of life in a small French town during World War I, Pialat draws out sequences to a length rarely attained in feature films. Even with so much going on (actions at various planes of the composition, characters overflowing the frame, overlapping dialogue), little happens that’s reducible to, or recuperable by, a plot. As late as Van Gogh (1991; March 13 at 10:30 a.m.; March 17 at 3 p.m.; March 27 at 11 a.m.), the most distinctive scenes are the loose, plotless stretches of music and communal enjoyment. These scenes, in their expansiveness, their accommodation of mood, gesture, and detail, are reminiscent of earlier Pialat set pieces (like the idyllic picnic in La maison des bois), in which the camera is always an interested but excluded observer. In Loulou, a seemingly improvised sequence of an outdoor lunch incorporates numerous people talking at once, with abrupt switches in interest. (Suddenly a dog is chasing a hen.) The famous dinner scene in Ė nos amours crackles with tensions stated and unstated, threats, allusions, humor — all the uncertainty of the film is encapsulated and sustained here, and here Pialat’s particular point of view is most fully articulated.

Pialat’s work is remarkable for the gravity and soberness it achieves while building up a richness of lived reality, both in the documentation of the real cities and towns where the films are set and in the thorough compiling of information about how people’s habits create their dˇcor. (L’enfance nue and La maison des bois are both concerned with how members of foster families learn to occupy space together.) In Sous le soleil de Satan (1987; March 16 at 6 p.m.), with Depardieu as anguished, saintly Father Donissan, Pialat makes no attempt to rival the severity of Bresson (his great predecessor in adapting novelist Georges Bernanos to the cinema, in Le journal d’un curˇ de campagne/Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette). The starkest shots — for example, Donissan’s troubled meditation against a milky windowpane and a bare white wall — are still plunged in the dry sensuality characteristic of Pialat’s work. The shattering sequence of Donissan’s visit to a house where a child has just died goes through extremes of light and dark with caressing and urgent camera movements and a physical astringency reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The brilliant Willy Kurant shot Sous le soleil de Satan; the desolate mood of La gueule ouverte/The Mouth Agape (1974; March 3 at 8:30 p.m.), which was shot by Nestor Almendros, is just as grounded in naturalistic detail: wine bottles on a side table, yarns and fabrics in a cluttered shop, a newspaper laid over a small table like a cloth. In the room where his mother is dying, a man rifles a chest of drawers in a distracted, bored way and finds a photo album, over which he lingers. Much of the film consists of vignettes like this, never mentioned later and leading nowhere within the plot of the film, but crucial for our sense of the characters, their environment, and their history. Pialat deals in a hopeless intimacy: we can go only so far with his people before a barrier rises, formed partly out of their self-protective concealments (which also separate them from one another) and partly out of the director’s refusal to compromise his sense of the opacity of existence.

Each Pialat film includes surprising moments of physical violence, usually among people who love each other: the terrible corporal punishment administered to Fran¨ois in L’enfance nue; Jean’s brutality toward Catherine in Nous ne viellirons pas ensemble; the slap with which the father surprises Suzanne in Ė nos amours. Even Vincent and Thˇo Van Gogh come to blows. The gestural quality of these films is crucial: the human body in Pialat is always a source of disruption, and perhaps he considers violence a particular category of gesture. In any case, violence never finishes a relationship in Pialat, except for the heroine’s killing her lover in Sous le soleil de Satan, and that is an accident. If his contradictory cutting is itself a kind of violence, it’s also a way of expressing the characters’ resilience and the durability of their connections with one another. Then let the last words be Depardieu’s: "He is the only filmmaker who speaks truly about love."


Issue Date: February 25 - March 3, 2005
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