Sadness will last forever par Noël Herpe
Passe ton bac d'abord (1979) et A nos amours (1983)


        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 to Positif for the opening of A 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 A 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 1980's, A 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 d'abord, the father giving lessons in A 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 A 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.


[Texte écrit pour la revue Positif en Mars 2003 et traduit en anglais - par Hilary Radner et Alistair Fox - pour la revue australienne Senses of cinema, Issue n°25 (March-April 2003) et publié avec l'autorisation de son auteur.]

Noël Herpe
Maître de conférences en "Etudes Cinématographiques et Audiovisuelles" à l'Université de Caen et critique de cinéma pour la revue Positif.