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DATE: Wednesday, March 2, 2005
SECTION: Arts
PAGE: F4
By Ethan Gilsdorf, Globe Correspondent
Godard. Truffaut. Pialat?
The name Maurice Pialat isn't the first that comes to mind when one assembles
a list of influential French movie directors. Yet Pialat came out of the
same generation as Godard and Truffaut and amassed an equally impressive
body of work some 16 films over a 40-year career that brought fame to
actors like Sandrine Bonnaire and Gerard Depardieu. Two of his films won
prizes at the Venice and Cannes festivals.
But by the time Pialat died in 2003, his contribution to cinema remained
neither well-defined nor easily classifiable. Besides, his often escargot-paced
storytelling and haphazard editing style has tended to keep away audiences
as often as attract them.
Helping to bring long overdue credit to this nearly unheard of auteur
is a 12-program retrospective coming to the Museum of Fine Arts, jointly
sponsored by the French Consulate and the French Library and Cultural
Center. The majority of Pialat's work 10 features, one short, and one
six-hour TV miniseries will be screened at the MFA today through March
27.
Pialat didn't begin his filmmaking career until he was well into his 40s,
which is one reason he didn't enjoy the fame of his contemporaries. Trained
as a painter, Pialat first worked in the 1960s as a documentary director
for French television.
With the support of Truffaut, Pialat made "L'Enfance nue" ("Naked Childhood"),
his feature-length fiction film debut, in 1968. Though it came out during
the turmoil of student protests, this portrait of a foster child who finally
finds peace after being housed with an elderly couple is far from radical.
But "Naked Childhood" did quietly launch the realistic filmmaking aesthetic
for which Pialat is remembered.
Like the Danish "Dogme 95" school that he undoubtedly influenced, Pialat
rejected most of the tricks and trappings of modern cinema. He preferred
the hand-held camera to elaborate dolly and tracking shots. He avoided
artificial lighting, leaving many scenes shrouded in inky blues and blacks.
He disliked adding sound during post-production, relying on a location's
stereo or car radio to provide the music. He often chose to cut from a
scene at uncalculated, sometimes jarring, moments.
Within his films, tempo and energy levels can careen wildly: from jittery
shots in the streets one moment to nearly motionless sequences of lovers
lolling and giggling in bed the next.
Over his career, Pialat worked with some of France's biggest names Sophie
Marceau, Nathalie Baye, Isabelle Huppert, and his most frequent collaborators,
Bonnaire and Depardieu encouraging them to improvise, rather than stick
to a script. But unlike these actors' more conventional films, Pialat's
work neither reached for familiar French cinema themes nor used romantic,
monument-studded Paris locations.
Rather, Pialat took his viewers to remote country villages and anonymous
urban neighborhoods to paint his brutally honest view of interpersonal
relations, typically seen through the eyes of violent brutes (think Depardieu)
cut off from their own emotional lives.
Pialat also never shied away from keeping seemingly pointless conversational
gestures and pauses off the cutting-room floor. The result of this cinematic
bias are films that can seem less about what happens to the characters
and their psychological motives than simply the quotidian rhythms of human
interaction.
In "Police" (1985), Depardieu and his fellow cops incessantly interrogate
suspects, yet scant information useful to the story is revealed. An early
scene in "The Mouth Agape" ("La gueule ouverte," 1974) consists of a single,
nearly static 10-minute long shot of a lunch-time meal.
"Loulou" (1980) contains a similar sequence: Depardieu brings Huppert
home to the country for a Sunday dinner that, inexplicably yet wonderfully,
meanders into improvisational "cinema verite," whose purpose is to capture
the banality of family small talk. Contrast this notion with the lean
and efficient Hollywood film, whose every scene is calculated to the second
and judged by how it contributes to advancing the plot.
Still, Pialat tackled some of cinema's most durable genre standards with
his own twist, of course. He made family dramas: "The Mouth Agape," a
daringly spare story of a dying mother and the son whose infidelity masks
his sorrow. He made intimate portraits of lovers: "We Will Not Grow Old
Together" ("Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble," 1972), an almost comical
take on two protagonists who refuse to let go of each other. He made crime
films like "Police," a discursive take on the Paris cops-and-robbers genre.
He made historical period pieces: "Van Gogh" (1991), perhaps his most
conservative feature, is a ruthless portrait of the painter gorgeously
shot on location in Auvers-sur-Oise, the French town where Van Gogh ended
his life.
When watching Pialat, patience is a virtue. Fortunately, the waiting is
frequently rewarded. Jacques Dutronc, who played the lead in "Van Gogh,"
perhaps summed up Pialat best when he said, "His films are moving paintings,
not quite dry."
For a complete schedule and tickets, visit www.mfa.org/film or call 617-369-3306.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at egilsdorf@yahoo.com.
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