Some (semi)spontaneous prose subsequent to viewing "Loulou" par Glen W. Norton
Loulou (1981)

        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.

        Maurice Pialat is the master of intangible day-to-day emotion : drunken falls and embraces, fights which bubbleup 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 – you feel it in your own smile, your own shock, your own tears.
        This, I believe, is the mark of a great filmmaker.      


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

Glen W. Norton
Doctoral candidate in "Social and political Thought" at York University, Toronto.
In charge of Website about Jean-Luc Godard [http://www.geocities.com/glen_norton/].