Maurice Pialat (1980)
Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) goes to a disco with André (Guy Marchand), the man she lives with. She leaves the disco with Loulou (Gérard Depardieu) and they spend the night together. When she returns to their apartment, André tries to chuck her out. They make up but she then leaves and shacks up with Loulou anyway. André runs an advertising business, where Nelly also has a job. When she moves into a small apartment with Loulou, it’s she who pays the bills: Loulou doesn’t work at all, except for the odd bit of petty crime. He likes booze and sex, both as often as possible. As he tells one of his pals, he doesn’t go in for thinking. Nelly finds all these things powerfully attractive, just as she’s turned off by the relatively cultured and cerebral André.
Loulou’s set-up is familiar enough. Middle-class woman abandons secure, passionless bourgeois existence for a bit of rough. What comes next seems par for the course too. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks sex machine impregnates the heroine, something her ex with more brains than balls never managed to do. The prospect of fatherhood appeals to Loulou. In response to questions about his and Nelly’s future from her conventional, young-executive-type brother (Humbert Balsan), Loulou even says he’ll get a job, once the baby arrives. Urbanite Nelly’s first meeting with Loulou’s rustic family changes things, though. During an alfresco lunch, in a farmyard, his loco brother-in-law (Patrick Playez) starts brandishing a shotgun. No one gets hurt but Nelly gets an abortion. Although this distresses Loulou, he and Nelly remain an item. The last shot of the film shows them leaving a bar and heading back home together.
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, welcoming a retrospective of the work of Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2015, called him ’one of the greatest, most influential, and most misunderstood modern directors’. For Brody, ‘Their most salient traits render Pialat’s films not merely unlovable but almost odious – and that’s their distinctive and inimitable virtue’. Since Loulou is the first Pialat I’ve seen, I’m in no position to dispute Brody’s judgments. I can only say I wouldn’t apply any of his adjectives to this particular film (which is one of the director’s best-known). It’s possible I couldn’t see the wood of Pialat’s special style and approach for the trees of a not unusual scenario, in terms of plot and character types. Perhaps it’s considered ‘distinctive’ that Pialat and Arlette Langmann (who wrote the screenplay with him) don’t supply the protagonists with clear motivations for their actions. Until Nelly decides to have the abortion, both she and Loulou appear to act on impulse, to do what they feel like doing. But if you’ve seen movie characters like these behaving similarly with reasons explained, the withholding of such information doesn’t seem to matter much.
Loulou‘s famous leads hold your attention – as much, at this distance in time, because they look so young and different as because of their acting (though the talents of both are clear enough). Depardieu had just turned thirty and was still in decent physical shape. Huppert, in her mid-twenties, still had her gamine bloom and a bit of roundness in her face. It’s Guy Marchand, however, who creates the only interesting character. At the start this seems highly unlikely. Although we first see Loulou in the process of dumping his latest lover (Frédérique Cerbonnet), his vivid spontaneity is evident and appealing. Our introduction to André in the disco is to a sharp-tongued, coldly possessive misogynist: you feel any woman in her right mind would want to get away from him. Yet his weakness and neediness later in the story, especially when he and Nelly go to bed together one more time and she takes the opportunity to tell André she’s pregnant with Loulou’s child, are the most unexpected and expressive part of Pialat’s story. Not long after Loulou, Guy Marchand was again rejected by Isabelle Huppert, in Diane Kurys’ Coup de foudre (1983). If memory serves, he was the best thing in that film too.
23 November 2019
