by Various March 2003Feature Articles, Issue 25
Contributions by Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le
Cain and Glen W. Norton
The Final Shot: Le Garçu
by Fabien Boully
Fabien Boully teaches Film Studies at the University of
Paris X-Nanterre.
In the final shot of Maurice Pialat’s final film, Le Garçu
(1995), a beautiful young woman sobs while sitting at a table in a little
restaurant in Paris. With difficulty, Sophie (Géraldine Pailhas) manages to
contain her grief. At her side, off-screen, we know that Gérard (Gérard
Depardieu) sits silently, a man with whom she has had a hyperactive but lovable
little boy (Antoine Pialat), who is, himself, not far away either. Why do
Sophie’s tears move us so? Why does this grief, so dignified in its discretion,
seem to condense the emotional charge of the entire film? Why, above all, in
Pialat’s vast oeuvre, is it this final image – the final shot of his entire
cinema – that one wishes to remember?
Within an apparently fragmentary and digressive form, Le
Garçu is unified by one essential question: what creates our attachments to
others? The film centers on the intermixing of ties between people who
demonstrate these enigmatic but indestructible attachments, painful, unbearable
or irritating as they often are. Gérard, first of all (whom one recognizes as
Pialat’s alter-ego, giving the film the sense of a subtle self-portrait)
appears to struggle with ties of all sorts – loving ties, paternal ties,
filial, friendly, sexual, etc. – but doesn’t quite know how to situate himself
in relation to each one. Thus, after he and Sophie separate, he returns to her,
again and again, to the point of intrusion (at one point surprising her with an
enormous toy truck he brings in the middle of the night). It’s not clear if his
motive is to be close to his son, or because he can’t stand the idea of Sophie
having a new lover, Jeannot (Dominique Rocheteau). As for Sophie, she suffers
from the abominable way in which Gérard treats her, but at the same time
cultivates regret at not having been loved by him the way Jeannot loves her:
with tenderness, being present for her and her son.
The most important words in this film are thus those that
Gérard throws at Sophie a moment before her tears in the restaurant: “Your
attachment to my father … you love the families of others because you didn’t
have any grandparents,” he reproaches her, but not without concluding,
“Grandparents are important … when you don’t have them, you miss them.” Cast in
doubt, but nonetheless recognized as a necessity, the affectionate tie that
Sophie has woven with Gérard’s father – the eponymous Garçu – becomes the
symbol of all the infinitely problematic ties that the characters of this film
carry, like hidden wounds, and which sometimes come to light.
If Sophie’s tears touch us so profoundly, it is because
Pialat appears to have wanted to leave his film in suspense on the subject of
the intimate suffering caused by our attachment to people. Without a doubt,
Sophie cries less about not having been loved as she wished by Gérard than
about the tie, distorted but tenacious, that persists between them; a tie that
brings with it a procession of painful memories. She also cries about a loss of
will or courage – both a weakness and an admirable leaning of the heart – that
prevents her, once and for all, from ending this complicated and unsatisfying
relationship that leaves her so bitter.
There are numerous characters in Pialat’s films, both men
and women – one thinks of Jean (Jean Yanne) in We Will Not Grow Old
Together(1972) or Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) in To Our Loves (1983) – who
don’t know how to profit from the happiness they have at the present, and who
run after, and lament, this happiness after it has been definitively lost. They
seem to be carriers of a terminal dissatisfaction and fear of attachment that
obliges them to detestable behaviors which torture them more than they hurt the
people they love. Sophie does not belong to this category of character, but she
had a child with one of them. More than Gérard, then, it is to the most severe
part of Pialat’s cinema that Sophie finds herself eternally tied. Why not feel,
then, that her tears express the sadness engendered by this severity? Now that
we have a sense of Pialat’s oeuvre in its final definition, why not think that
the director wanted deliberately, with his characteristic unsparingness, to put
forth the harshest face in his oeuvre? This is the reason for which, in the
final analysis, Sophie’s tears are so distressing.
Translated by Alice Lovejoy
Passe ton bac d’abord (1979), À nos amours (1983): Sadness
Will Last Forever
by Noël Herpe
Noël Herpe currently teaches French cinema at the University
of Caen and the University of Paris-I. He also writes for the journal Positif,
and recently published Le Film dans le texte: l’œuvre écrite de René Clair
(Jean-Michel Place).
This article was first published in Positif (March 2003). It
appears here with permission.
In the beginning, Pialat created a naturalism that was born
of formalism. From L’Amour existe (Love Exists, 1960) to Nous ne vieillirons
pas ensemble (We Will Not Grow Old Together, 1972) it consists, in the first
instance, of blocks of reality torn in pain from artifice—beginning with those
suburban landscapes that one perceives in his first short film, in the
brilliance of a pane of glass in pieces…. When Jean Yanne sits down to dial a
phone number, it is as if one hears the director cry: “Action.” One feels at
each moment his presence and his breath, like a God who has not yet resigned
himself to abandon his creatures and would like to accompany them until they
learn how to live by themselves through enduring brutal shocks. In due course,
there will be the grand romantic structure of Police (1985), Sous le soleil de
Satan (Under the Sun of Satan, 1987), or Van Gogh(1991): work that relies
again, of course, on a narration that is broken into pieces throughout its
length… But it seems that the ambition of the “story teller” – that which
Pialat himself expressed in an interview given toPositif for the opening of À
nos amours (To Our Loves), and which he had probably not entirely fulfilled
until La Maison des bois (The House of the Forest, 1971) – maintains this work
in an unstable balance between demonstration and exhibition, between
intransigence and complaisance. I need only point, for example, to the all too
notorious brothel scene in Van Gogh, in which duration becomes a rhetorical
motif, and in which the very opacity of time insists upon presenting itself to
view. And under the guise of a return to the beginning, Le Garçu(1995) marks
the consecration of the latest Pialat manner (not necessarily the least
mannerist): the filmmaker substitutes an obsessive and interminable temporality
(which ends up resembling a mirror without limits) for the calm blocks of the
past (all the more violent because abstract).
Midway between these two aspects of the work (it will be
obvious that I incline towards the first, which would have been enough to make
Pialat one of the greatest French filmmakers), there is the singular period
consisting of the “films of adolescence”, Passe ton bac d’abord (Get Your
Degree First) and À nos amours … These are also the films of my adolescence.
This is perhaps what moves me to accord them a privileged status. Alongside
Rohmer’s comedies, at the beginning of the 1980s, À nos amours is the only film
that could have kept me from one screening to another inside a film theater.
For once, here was someone who was speaking to me about what I was, about
people with whom I might rub shoulders, dramas and psychodramas that shaped the
course of one’s life… Even today (and still very close to Rohmer, though from a
less ironic perspective of course), I rediscover there the only accurate
depiction of this France that is coming into being, caught in a vise between
the moral paralysis of the post-war years (possessive parents, sexual taboos,
marriage as the only means of escaping the suffocation of the family) and the
new conservatism of the consumer society (bodies, clothes, sensations that
bring an illusory liberation). The accuracy of such a depiction derives from a
strange effect of magnification, as though Pialat denied himself any
objectivity and sought, on the contrary, to locate himself in the heart of this
neurosis. In this, beyond the tradition of the great Christian pamphleteers,
from Huysmans to Péguy, from Bloy to Bernanos, he is the contemporary of Thomas
Bernhard, in his passionate determination to mine despair, to repeat it, to
amplify it in order to come to the end of it. He is a kind of modern Job,
doggedly determined to reiterate his curses from a dung heap which is the only
place from whence he allows himself to speak, at the same time judge and
victim, mired in a despicable humanity that he would like nevertheless to save.
And what moves me above all in these two films is the
frankness with which Pialat exposes this knot, impossible to cut, that ties him
to his characters: the kind of maladroitness that he begins to inscribe
“outside” (the quadri-genarians sadly flirting in Passe ton bac, the father
giving lessons in À nos amours) while all the time hoping for a transmission to
happen of which he will no longer be the master… In this regard, nothing is
more shattering than the masochistic posture that he gives himself in À nos
amours: at first sight, interposing himself in the body of the film as a
representative of the law, of rigor or loftiness accompanied by a deliberate
disagreeable haughtiness; less obviously, slipping away in the middle of the
story as though he wishes to leave his daughter to “her loves”, returning only
to make himself odious and to better encourage Suzanne to fly with her own
wings. The final sequence derives its meaning from the play between the two
when tenderness succeeds absence; when the face of the father falls again into
darkness, eclipsed by the face of his daughter who takes flight towards other
skies… It seems to me that what Pialat reveals to us at this juncture in his
work is the secret of his failing mastery: the passionate desire to create a
world that escapes him, to let himself be overcome and overtaken by others
(here, by a new generation who will no longer speak his language, who will no
longer be in his image); and the anguish of being obliged when the day comes to
disappear from the screen, accepting that his films will continue to exist
without him.
Translated by Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox
On Pialat and Loulou
by Maximilian Le Cain
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinephile living in
Cork City, Ireland.
In the context of my cinematic autobiography, Pialat matters
as very few other directors do.
I first encountered him in the early to mid ’90s when I was
14 or 15 in the form of a tape of Loulou (1980). Already an incurable and
opinionated film junky, my preference for classical Hollywood filmmaking had
been broadened and deepened over the past couple of years by the discovery of
such art movie giants as Fellini, Bergman, Bertolucci and, most significantly,
Tarkovsky, Bresson and Visconti. But my view of contemporary cinema was still
dominated by Hollywood and, as such, tended to be somewhat despairing. I
subscribed to the notion that if a film was worth making, it had already been
made and made before 1965. What I didn’t know or appreciate was the modern film’s
capacity for naturalism and the exploration of its problematics. I hadn’t
experienced mid-period Rossellini, Cassavetes, Rohmer, Hellman, the post-French
New Wave, the Iranians or the Taiwanese. Even if I had seen these films then, I
would probably have dismissed them. What was needed was a trauma to rip through
my aesthetic beliefs, creating an inner scar that would ache and tremble with
excitement at the cinema’s potential for capturing a given moment in all its
messy spontaneity, for staring fixedly into the eye of temporal and emotional
reality and fearlessly recording the sometimes unnerving beauty of its return
stare.
Loulou provided this necessary jolt. The opening image,
suddenly springing out of the briefest of credit titles, had the immediate
mystery of an unexpected cold night breeze striking one’s face upon leaving a
warm room. A woman – Isabelle Huppert, her face displaying an enigmatic or even
arrogantly impenetrable beauty – appears out of the gray Parisian night without
quite emerging from it. She walks directly towards the hand held camera that
pans left to follow her as she disappears behind a column. She looks briefly
past the camera at a kissing couple leaning against the column before vanishing
into a nightclub, physically absorbed by the eroticised atmosphere of a
nocturnal environment charged with sexual possibility. This 14-or-15 year old
was instantly hooked!
What I expected to happen next was for the director to
affect, as it were, a formal introduction to the characters: to tell the
viewers how to react to them, to be for or against them or else to be placed in
an analytically privileged position with regard to a carefully signposted
character ambiguity. But the characters seemed to have ideas of their own. From
the outset their interactions seemed to occur with no thought of the audience.
Rather than playing to the camera, the camera sometimes seemed almost chasing
them, spying on them. And the director, this Pialat, had no intention of
telling us what to think or feel.
As the film progressed, I was gripped and slowly overcome by
a singular form of anxiety, one that seemed to emerge from my subconscious
where it had remained buried for a decade or more. As I witnessed every concept
of cinematic time that I had ever known disintegrate during the long picnic
scene towards the end of the film, one of the most beautiful in all cinema, the
identity of this feeling revealed itself. It was the insecurity a young child
experiences when his parents leave him or her in the company of strange adults.
In the same way I felt that Pialat had abandoned the viewer with his
characters, leaving us to make our own way in their vividly realistic world. I
left the film disturbed, overwhelmed even. I knew that whether I liked it or
not, my experience of what the cinema was able to accomplish had been
irreparably altered, blown apart, torn to shreds. Pialat, it seemed to me,
hadn’t made this picture for the audience; he had made it for the characters.
The resulting film had an emotional life of its own, the terrifying
truthfulness of which was brought about both through the intensity of the
performances, which appeared unpredictable when compared to traditional cinema,
and the screen time given to the actors to live and breathe in this
environment.
In the ten years since first drawing these retrospectively
elementary and even rather naïve conclusions, I’ve seen the majority of
Pialat’s works and loved most of them. But Loulou remains my favourite, the
film that changed my cinematic goals and, by extension, my whole life. The last
time I saw it was on January 12th immediately after receiving an email from a
friend informing me of Pialat’s death. Its undiminished brilliance highlighted
the fact that cinema had just lost one of its most fearless and ferociously talented
practitioners.
Some (semi)spontaneous prose subsequent to viewing Loulou
again after hearing of Pialat’s death
by Glen W. Norton
Glen W. Norton is a doctoral candidate in Social and
Political Thought at York University, Toronto. He has written for various
journals and magazines, and also maintains the Cinema=Jean-Luc Godard=Cinema
website.
A few years ago I was making a short film, just some
improvisation around the dinner table – I provided the topic of discussion and
let my actors go from there. I had forgotten I was taking my lead from Pialat’s
Loulou – the scene of Depardieu and Huppert arriving, sitting outside with the
family, the old women fussing over food, all of them eating oysters, dogs
chasing roosters, children playing on knees – my inspiration was basically the
drinking and general festive mood of this scene. Watch it again and look at
Huppert’s face – is she happy, sad, pissed at Depardieu? The direction is
remarkable – watch the camera movement, the framing. It looks like Pialat gave his
actors free reign to create a totally convincing situation, complete with
improvisation, overlapping dialogue and “honest” reactions, especially Huppert
choking on the strong oyster sauce and Depardieu responding to the young
child’s questions. This scene, the whole film in fact, teeters between joy and
pain, love and contempt – the mother’s speech about taking in the orphaned boy,
and as she talks his face becomes both sad and happy at the same time; the
crazy husband threatening to shoot everyone… This is what Pialat captures in
all of his work, bittersweet emotion that makes me smile half-knowingly in true
amazement. One could analyse it, tease out the different themes and plot the
trajectory of his narrative; for me however this small moment with characters
sitting outdoors and actually enjoying themselves and their food (who else can
film these scenes but the French?), reacting and playing off one another –
perhaps I am romanticising this “French” attitude toward food and drink and
life. But no, I’ve seen it elsewhere, in a scene from Le rayon vert (1986),
say, discussing vegetarianism – with Rohmer, however, the emphasis is on the
conversation; in Loulou we get to see faces, gestures, familial concern. We get
to see a universal domestic milieu boiled down to ten minutes of grace and
love. No matter what one might hear about Pialat’s “misanthropy,” this scene
above all others shows a care for humanity, man’s happiness and love tempered
by… no, not tempered but laid bare, truly shown, in its actuality because the
form of love, especially this love within the family setting, always exists
alongside feelings of petty jealousy and scorn. We catch some of this in
Huppert’s ambiguous look at Depardieu… it is a loving look which of course has
within its depths something scornful, some tension which manifests itself in
the next scene; perhaps she realises then and there that she must abort their
child.
Pialat is the master of intangible day-to-day emotion:
drunken falls and embraces, fights which bubble up for no reason, ennui sitting
in bars, the fleeting joy of a shared meal – in short, the immediacy of life
closing around us despite our plans otherwise. I will always be in debt to him
for shaping my own ideas of what a true “cinematic aesthetic” should be. In his
films you do not merely see the pain, the hurt, the love, the joy – youfeel it
in your own smile, your own shock, your own tears. This, I believe, is the mark
of a great filmmaker.
Merci et adieu.
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