Word: pialat
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DIED. MAURICE PIALAT, 77, acclaimed French film director; of kidney failure; in Paris. In dramas such as Police, Loulou and The Mouth Agape, the auteur painted uncompromising, unforgettable portraits of desolation. His characters--cops, priests, kids on the run, deathbed parents--were sacred monsters in strangled agony...
WHAT LUST? WHAT LIFE? NOT FOR MAUrice Pialat the gorgeously gaudy tones in which Hollywood paints the fine artist. The French writer-director's VAN GOGH is a portrait -- almost a still life -- of a somber fellow who is too busy creating masterpieces in the final months of his life to have time for melodramatic effects like lopping off his ear. In such films as Loulou and A Nos Amours, Pialat has sullenly railed against the strictures of French bourgeois life. In Van Gogh, he has found a kindred spirit; for both, artistic compromise is a crime against humanity. Jacques...
Then, as if cued by Stephen King, the wicked witch showed up in this fairy- tale resort on the Cote d'Azur. The creature arrived in the ursine form of Maurice Pialat, critically the most revered, personally the most reviled, of France's movie auteurs. A few days before, he had shown his new movie, Under the Sun of Satan, a stately adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel about a self-torturing priest (Gerard Depardieu); its directorial style fell somewhere between rigor and rigor mortis. And now Yves Montand, president of this year's festival jury, was announcing the award...
...well have said that Ripple had been designated the official French wine, for the Palais audience immediately erupted in derisive whistles and howls. Catherine Deneuve, who presented the award, pleaded futilely for the mob to give the director a chance to defend his honor. But the catcalls delighted Pialat. "If you don't like me," he proclaimed, "I can tell you, I don't like you either." He smiled and raised a defiant fist. More boos, more hoots. Somebody spat at him. PALME D'OR SCANDALE A CANNES, screamed the next day's papers...
Thank you, members of the jury. Merci, M. Pialat and all your enemies in the Grand Palais. You brought the last-minute thrill of spontaneous animosity to a festival that had nearly suffocated in gentility. Until then, this assembly of 30,000 producers, directors, stars, distributors, critics and other swains of the celluloid muse could find little to cheer and even less to condemn. Oh, sure, you could watch Michael Sarrazin strangle a nude hermaphrodite in the Belgian thriller Mascara. You could cruise the low-rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos...