Word: depardieu
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...Marion (Catherine Deneuve) has fixed up a secret apartment for him beneath the theater's stage. Steiner listens to rehearsals and directs a new production by giving his notes to his wife during her nightly visits. By day, she tries to cope with her bumptious leading man (Gerard Depardieu), who is involved in the Resistance, and the affection that grows between them almost unconsciously. The chief menace is a smart, epicene drama critic and Nazi collaborator who senses the supposedly exiled Steiner may be near at hand...
...wife, children, and mistress but a wimpy, play-by-the-rules kiss-ass in the office. Nicole Garcia's Janine represents that curious person you know well but who is either brilliant and wily or a complete and utter moron--and you can't decide which it is. Gerard Depardieu, oddly enough, looks more like Cro-Magnon Man in a three-piece suit than he does in his usual dirty t-shirt. But his primitive good looks help in his appearing appropriately uncomfortable in his high-powered, corporate surroundings...
...best film, The Mouth Agape (1974), traced a woman's slow, painful death and its effect on her husband and her son. The film was slow and painful, and almost heroic in its unflinching compassion. Now, in Loulou, Pialat tells the story of an arrogant wastrel (Gerard Depardieu) and his sexual hold on a middle-class woman (Isabelle Huppert). She rejects the wimpy masochism of her petulant lover for the violent energies of the world's greatest stud. Last Tango, Take...
This is, potentially, hot stuff. But Depardieu and Huppert, who at least on paper would seem to make a pretty erotic combination, refuse to strike sparks. Depardieu has played this part before, and now looks to have played it out. Huppert, with the freckled, enigmatic face of a sullen schoolgirl, is a tabula rosé on which other directors have written personality. But Pialat is too reticent to give her dramatic motivation, and Huppert is too self-enclosed to convey the orgasmic release that would give her character, and the film, a little life. Alas, Loulou is a corpse...
Blier achieves his subversive vision by pushing his characters' behavior to outrageous extremes. Handkerchiefs is a wet dream gone beautifully berserk. The tone is set by the opening scene, in which Depardieu presents Dewaere, a total stranger, as a "gift" to his wife Solange. She remains indifferent to the men's shenanigans, and the men succumb to complete bafflement. They sit by Solange's bedside, aimlessly but poetically speculating about the mysteries that lie within her heart and mind. Only when the heroine falls for a 13-year-old prodigy (Riton) does she finally arouse from...