Word: pialat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LOULOU Directed by Maurice Pialat Screenplay by Arlette Langmann and Maurice Pialat...
French Director Maurice Pialat sits behind his camera like a bacteriologist at his microscope, waiting patiently for his subjects to squirm to life. He does not argue or judge; he observes and classifies. In 13 years he has made but five films, each dissecting the lives of the French working class at a crisis point: the onset of adolescence, the breakup of a marriage, the end of a life. His 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...
...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, and here Pialat has only graduated from sympathetic scientist to a coroner of sexual obsession...