On Pialat and Loulou par Maximilian Le Cain
Loulou (1980)

        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.

[Texte écrit pour la revue australienne Senses of cinema, Issue n°25 (March-April 2003) et publié avec l'autorisation de son auteur.]

Maximilian Le Cain
Réalisateur et critique de cinéma. Vit à Cork City en Irlande.