Word: pialat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Director Maurice Pialat (Loulou, A Nos Amours) and Screenwriter Catherine Breillat know that police work is more talk than action, and they allow the third-degree sessions to wear down the viewer as well the suspect. The cumulative effect, though, is bracing. Police is a stark vision of a forlorn specialist, doomed to be brilliant at his job. Depardieu...
...face, and voilà a deep dimple appears incongruously in her left cheek. From wanton to elfin in the flick of an adolescent whim-such are the compelling mysteries of personality. Bonnaire stars as the teen-age Suzanne in this doggedly unsentimental French film from Writer-Director Maurice Pialat. Suzanne's family has stayed together by corseting all hostilities. Then she discovers the power of her own erotic impulse. Overnight, Daddy's little girl is a slut in Mama's eyes, and the family falls into convulsions of jealousy and hatred. Like the off-Hollywood films...