The retrospective of the films of Maurice Pialat at the Museum of the Moving Image, running from today through November 1st, is a welcome chance to revisit the work of a filmmaker who is one of the greatest, most influential, and most misunderstood modern directors. It’s too easy, today, to love Pialat’s films, precisely because their influence has rendered their style and tone familiar. His films superficially resemble many lesser American independent dramas and run-of-the-mill European dramas, or, rather, vice versa—these films resemble his, as a result of his direct or osmotic influence. But many of these successors and tributaries shy away from the very tensions that his films embody. Their most salient traits render Pialat’s films not merely unlovable but almost odious—and that’s their distinctive and inimitable virtue.
Pialat’s movies depict an extraordinary spectrum of rage and bitterness, and his creative force seems fuelled by those very feelings—due, in part, to the fact that he wasn’t able to make his first feature, “L’Enfance Nue” (“Naked Childhood”) until 1968, when he was forty-three. (He died at seventy-seven, in 2003.) He was a near-contemporary of the New Wave filmmakers but considered himself their victim (as he said in this 1992 TV appearance, “They were succeeding, I was in the pits … they were making things, I wasn’t”), even though that first film was co-produced by François Truffaut.
In 1996, the French director Arnaud Desplechin said, “The filmmaker whose influence has been the strongest and most constant on the young French cinema isn’t Jean-Luc Godard but Maurice Pialat.” That’s true—because, with Godard having gotten to the end of the cinema, he left young filmmakers nowhere to go and nothing to do but change the paradigm (as those most significantly inspired by him, such as Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, and Leos Carax have done). But those who want to be influenced also want a ready-made paradigm to adapt to their own uses, and Pialat—whose pugnacious naturalism burns with the flame of modernity—seems to promise them one: a template for non-nostalgic realism.
But Pialat’s hostility to the New Wave deals a paradoxical twist to filmmakers inspired by him: he was the anti-cinephile par excellence, openly hostile to the New Wave’s studious devotions. Pialat created a deliberately non-nerd cinema. Young filmmakers taking Pialat as an influence are following him down a path that they should discover for themselves. His body of work is a cinema of experience—not of Hemingwayesque adventure but of immediate emotion and irrepressible impulse, of the vital force of the moment. Despite Pialat’s creation of an aesthetic specific to those emotions, he actually has far more artistic admirers than actual successors (Catherine Breillat, who co-wrote Pialat’s 1986 drama “Police,” is one). This lack of successors is a result of the specifics of his vision.
The philosopher Richard Rorty wrote that “liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Pialat is no liberal. His very subject is emotional violence, accompanied sometimes by physical violence, or realized sometimes with a few perfectly chosen, quietly spoken soul-killing words. “Naked Childhood” is a sort of successor to Truffaut’s first feature, “The 400 Blows.” Pialat’s film, too, is the story of a misunderstood young boy on the cusp of adolescence who gets into trouble with the law. But Pialat’s protagonist, François (Michel Terrazon), makes Truffaut’s youthful alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) look like an angel.
Doinel’s ill-considered actions put him at odds with a social order—and a government—that was indifferent (or hostile) to such ingenuous free-spiritedness. “The 400 Blows” is, among other things, a critical view of the French attitude toward children on the part of educators, psychologists, the law, and parents. Pialat’s François, however, is a foster child in revolt not against official order but against order itself. He’s a little terror who is sent out of one home after killing a cat. Adopted by a kindly elderly couple in a staid provincial town, he steals, lies, and ultimately commits a wanton act of violence. His destructive spirit isn’t rebellious or knowingly anti-authoritarian, just furious and willful. His violence and his deceit are a sort of existential affirmation, a mark on the world, the wrenching of a space—even a dreadful and self-punishing one—within which he makes his identity and recognizes himself.
Though the movie is set in 1968 (and even features footage of a sedate local protest march), the world of that small town, with its nonintellectual workaday rounds, is untouched by the wider turmoil of the times. For that matter, Pialat’s entire body of work seems more or less untouched by it. If the sixties hadn’t happened, Pialat’s films could have been the same, except for the fights with censors over full frontal nudity (mainly women’s) and over his characters’ sexual behavior and misbehavior. The era’s anti-hierarchical critical spirit, its self-conscious checks on power have no part in Pialat’s films.
Pialat developed his tone and his subjects on the basis of the toughness of superseded mores. (So did Jean Eustache, the director of “The Mother and the Whore.”) Yet Pialat’s aesthetic style is no throwback; his realism avoids facile diagnoses of his characters’ turbulence or its societal roots. His films lurch ahead from strong moment to strong moment, following the pleasure principle of his own fervent curiosity rather than the tracks of a plot line. In avoiding psychology and presenting the actions of his characters as rough and opaque blocks of life, he also avoids the psychological pointing and plot cues of classical studio-era filmmaking.
Filming mainly in long takes that keep his characters together in the frame, Pialat presents physical and emotional aggression with a steady and relentless gaze that suggests neither reticence nor coolness, neither indifference nor distance. His images are plainly and frankly confrontational, and his long takes convey the sense of holding eyelids open to observe his characters’ ferocious behavior and mighty torments.
At the same time, Pialat doesn’t play narrative games. He films the characters in action and doesn’t call attention to the artifices of the process. What’s more, his style owes nothing to, neither depends on nor inspires, the pathetic fallacy of agitated realism—the commonplace practice of filming conflict, whether physical or emotional, with a handheld camera in jerky motion, the images cut together quickly to signify disorder. His style is a double transfiguration of classicism and modernism alike.
In “La Gueule Ouverte,” from 1974 (it’s translated “The Mouth Agape,” but “gueule” is a vulgarity, like “trap” or “piehole”), Pialat takes a conventionally sentimental situation and turns it into a bitterly unsentimental view of family life. Monique (Monique Mélinand), a woman who’s not quite elderly, is being treated for cancer in Paris. The radiation treatments aren’t working, and the hospital throws her out and tells her son, Philippe (Philippe Léotard) to take her home. She lives with her husband, Roger (Hubert Deschamps) in a small and sleepy town in central France, in an apartment behind the wool-and-underwear store that he keeps. Philippe comes to stay with them, too, with his wife, Nathalie (Nathalie Baye, in one of her first major roles)—after her two-week vacation. But first, while she was travelling, Philippe picks up another woman in town and hopes to continue his trysts with her.
When Nathalie arrives, she dredges up long-stifled resentments against Philippe and his family, bringing out Monique’s mercenary nature and Roger’s relentless philandering (Nathalie calls him a “dirty old man”), accusing Philippe’s mother of having rejected her, accusing both his parents of having abandoned their son when he needed them, recalling that Philippe slapped her on their wedding day, and speculating that she’d have been better off if she hadn’t married him. Meanwhile, Roger brazenly carries on with other women while Monique lies suffering in bed; he feeds her and massages her feet but is impatient for her to die and is already making plans to remarry.
Pialat’s confrontational style depends not on a course of study but an approach to life. He’s as much of a first-person filmmaker as are many of the New Wave directors, but he doesn’t consider his own experience in terms of a scene by Bergman or a moment in Hawks. His art is a heuristic one, filled with cinematic serendipity (for instance, the simple and audacious brilliance of the second-to-last shot of “The Mouth Agape,” which should be a film-school anthology piece), but his inventions feel not like theoretical declarations or embodiments of abstract ideas but like the discovery of the very feelings on which the figures of style are molded, feelings as closely linked to Pialat’s own personality as are their visual realizations.
There’s plenty of physical violence in Pialat’s films, sometimes even dispensed by a character played by Pialat himself, such as the protagonist’s father in “À Nos Amours.” This movie, from 1983, is a work apart; it’s centered on a sixteen-year-old young woman named Suzanne, who is played by Sandrine Bonnaire, in her first leading role. The actress is Pialat’s great discovery, but Bonnaire is herself a remarkable discoverer. She lends Suzanne a remarkable composure in the face of onslaughts from her father (Pialat) and also from her mother (played by Evelyne Ker) and her brother (Dominique Besnehard), and also from the cruel or cold behavior of the men in her life. The subject of the movie is a young woman’s sexual awakening. But, for Pialat, sex is a vast and unyielding imperative, and Suzanne’s pursuit of pleasure is also a pursuit of self-definition and an effort to impose her will on her own little world—and, in the process, to expand it, to begin to live a fuller and freer life.
There’s no more furious presence in Pialat’s work than that of his virtual cinematic alter ego, Gérard Depardieu, who worked with him on four films. Depardieu’s wounded force pushes the filmmaker’s vision of a punishing world toward self-punishment, which reaches its apogee in one of his rarely screened films, “Under the Sun of Satan,” from 1987, a paradoxical drama that’s centered on religion and religious feeling but conveys no sense of piety or faith.
The film gave rise to Pialat’s most famous (or infamous) moment in the public eye, when it won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was jeered by members of the audience. (Pialat insulted them right back.) There, Depardieu plays a country priest, obsessed with evil, who offers his parishioners no consolation but, rather, a ruthless mirror of moral self-examination, which he applies to himself as well, with a scourge of physical self-punishment. (Pialat plays his clerical superior and gazes with rueful admiration at the actor and the character alike, both through the lens and within the frame.)
Pialat’s severe contemplation of a world of pain inflicted and endured is often unbearably quiet. Two people can sit together in a car, chat together at a dinner table, or recline together in bed and, speaking softly and hardly moving, can scar each other’s souls for life. It can also be loud, involving shrieking and wailing and the banging of heads on tables. Does Pialat approve? Neither more nor less than it would make sense to approve or disapprove of a thunderstorm. They’re not pretty, the passions of life, he seems to suggest—but somehow, in their urgency, necessity, and vitality, their ugliness is also beautiful.
Certainly, Pialat’s films are lovable and inspiring, but the love that they inspire, for those who watch them with imaginative sympathy, is hard, irresponsible, and unaccountable. His films are reports from inner and outer landscapes that few movie-loving viewers would willingly inhabit. There’s neither a symbolic nor an ironic dimension to deflect attention from his view of the towering monstrosity of human nature and the hard-won tenderness and furious outbursts of joy that arise from the same furious currents. His films demand to be taken whole, and Desplechin is right: his influence is intensely powerful—so powerful that it overwhelms and submerges all but the strongest filmmakers who endure it. Pialat’s admirers are legion; his followers are an intrepid few.