The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat

By Bergotte

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Maurice Pialat is the best French filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century that most people outside France have never seen, and the neglect is one of those quiet scandals that film culture periodically allows to accumulate without anyone taking responsibility for correcting it. He made films about love the way a surgeon operates — without anaesthetic, without sentiment, without the slightest interest in making the experience comfortable for anyone in the room. What he found when he cut that deep was not pretty, and he did not pretend otherwise. He found the truth, and the truth, in Pialat’s cinema, is always the same: that love is the place where human beings are most themselves, most generous, and most destructive, often within the same hour, and that there is nothing to be done about this except look at it directly and refuse to look away.

Maurice Pialat was born in 1925 in the Auvergne region of central France and came to cinema late, making his first feature at the age of forty-three after years as a painter and documentary filmmaker. The lateness matters. By the time he made L’Enfance nue in 1968 — a film about a troubled child in the French foster care system, shot with a documentary rawness that announced immediately that something new had arrived — he had already lived enough to be done with illusions. He had no interest in the consolations that cinema traditionally offered, no patience for the narrative structures that transform suffering into meaning, no appetite for the redemptive arc that allows audiences to leave the theatre feeling that things, on the whole, work out. Things, in Pialat’s experience and in his films, do not work out. People hurt each other. Love fails. Time passes and does not return. These are not tragic observations. They are, in his rendering, simply the facts, and the question is not how to transcend them but how to live inside them with your eyes open.

He is the filmmaker whose name comes up most quickly whenever serious critics discuss Cassavetes’ European equivalents, and the comparison is apt but requires immediate qualification. Both filmmakers are committed to emotional rawness, to performance as excavation rather than demonstration, to the camera as witness rather than manipulator. But where Cassavetes operates at a high emotional temperature — his films are volatile, often operatic in their intensity, built from scenes that escalate until they are almost unbearable — Pialat works at something closer to room temperature. His devastations are quiet. They arrive sideways. A scene that appears to be about nothing in particular — a meal, a car journey, a conversation about where to spend the weekend — will suddenly reveal itself to have been about everything, and the revelation lands not with a crash but with the soft, permanent weight of something true.

The girl who will not be saved

À nos amours, made in 1983 and the film at the centre of this essay, is Pialat’s most celebrated work and the one that makes his case most completely. It stars Sandrine Bonnaire, then fifteen years old and in her first film role, as Suzanne, a teenage girl from a working-class Parisian family who moves through a series of sexual relationships with a restlessness that her family reads as promiscuity and that the film understands as something more complicated and more sad: a search for something she cannot name, conducted in the only currency available to her.

The film’s refusal to diagnose Suzanne is its most radical quality. A lesser film would explain her — would locate in her childhood or her family dynamics or her psychology a cause for her behaviour that would make it legible, would give the audience the satisfaction of understanding. Pialat denies this satisfaction entirely. Suzanne is not explained. She is observed, with a patience and a respect that is itself a form of love — the love of a filmmaker for a character who resists the very thing narrative cinema most wants to do to its subjects, which is to make them make sense. She sleeps with boys she doesn’t love, she is indifferent to boys who love her, she is occasionally and unexpectedly tender, she is occasionally and unexpectedly cold, she is, in other words, a specific young human being at a specific moment in her life, and the specificity is everything.

What surrounds Suzanne is a family in barely controlled chaos. Her mother is brittle and resentful, her brother is volatile and threatening — there is a scene in which he hits her that Pialat films without flinching, without the editorial signals that would tell you how to feel about it, without any of the conventional distancing techniques that allow audiences to process violence at a safe remove. It simply happens, in a kitchen, in front of a running camera, and then something else happens, and then something else, and the film continues. This is Pialat’s method and his moral position simultaneously: that life does not pause to allow for processing, that events arrive without the packaging that narrative conventionally provides, and that the job of cinema — the job that almost no one is willing to do — is to replicate this quality of unpackaged experience as faithfully as the medium allows.

Pialat himself appears in the film as Suzanne’s father, who is absent for most of the story and returns in the final act with a disruptive force that is both damaging and, strangely, the closest thing to genuine love that the film contains. His scenes with Bonnaire are among the most extraordinary in French cinema — two performers working with an intimacy and a trust that produces something neither of them could have achieved alone. The father’s love for his daughter is real and useless, unable to protect her from anything, unable to change anything, but present and felt and, in its uselessness, more moving than a more competent love would be. This is the kind of emotional truth that Pialat specialised in: the love that does not save, the tenderness that arrives too late, the connection that is genuine and insufficient.

Time without consolation

One of the qualities that most distinguishes Pialat from almost every other filmmaker working in the tradition of emotional realism is his relationship with time. Specifically, his willingness to let time pass in his films without marking its passage with the conventional signals — the montage sequence, the change of seasons, the title card announcing a gap of months or years — that normally allow audiences to orient themselves. In Pialat, time simply passes, and you register it not through information but through accumulation: the way a character’s face has changed, the way a relationship has settled into a different pattern, the way the same room contains different emotional weather than it did an hour ago.

This is most pronounced in his earlier masterwork Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble — We Won’t Grow Old Together — made in 1972, which follows the final years of a relationship between a middle-aged filmmaker, Jean, and his younger lover, Catherine, with a mercilessness that is at once forensic and deeply compassionate. Jean is not a likeable man. He is selfish, controlling, prone to violence, unable to leave a relationship he has no intention of nourishing. Catherine is not an innocent victim — she stays, she returns, she participates in her own destruction with a passivity that the film refuses to excuse while also refusing to condemn. What Pialat is interested in is not blame but mechanism: the precise way this particular man and this particular woman have locked themselves into a pattern that destroys them both, and the impossibility of escape not because the doors are locked but because neither of them is capable of walking through them.

Jean-Yves Patte, playing Jean, and Marlène Jobert, playing Catherine, give performances of a kind that only Pialat seemed able to draw from his actors — performances that appear not to be performances at all, that have the quality of behaviour observed rather than enacted. This quality, shared with Cassavetes’ work and achieved by completely different means, is the defining characteristic of the French tradition that Pialat represents: a cinema of the body rather than the face, of physical presence rather than facial expression, of the specific weight that specific people bring to specific rooms. You believe in Pialat’s characters not because they are convincingly played but because they seem to simply exist, to have been found rather than created, to have wandered into the frame from a life that continues beyond it.

The unsparing eye

Pialat’s reputation in France is inseparable from his reputation as a difficult man — difficult to work with, difficult to be around, ferociously demanding of his collaborators and of himself. The stories are numerous and consistent: productions abandoned or restarted from scratch, actors pushed past the point of conventional professional tolerance, scenes reshot until whatever natural quality they had been drained of performance and what remained was something rawer and less controllable. When he received the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1987 for Sous le soleil de Satan, he was greeted with a mixture of applause and booing from the audience, and his response from the podium was characteristic: he turned to face the crowd, raised his fist, and said, if you don’t love me, I don’t love you either. It was the response of a man entirely unbothered by the approval of people he did not respect, and it captures something essential about the relationship between his personality and his work. He made the films he needed to make, in the way he needed to make them, and the cost of this stubbornness was a career that was always embattled and a body of work that has never received the international attention it deserves.

The difficulty was not temperamental vanity. It was, or so his films suggest, the product of a genuine and uncompromising commitment to a particular kind of truth — the kind that cannot be achieved without making everyone in the room uncomfortable, including yourself. Pialat’s films are not comfortable to make because they are not comfortable to watch, and they are not comfortable to watch because they do not allow the audience the distance from human experience that cinema normally provides. You are not observing Suzanne and her family from a safe critical position. You are in the room with them, breathing the same air, unable to manage your own response because Pialat has refused to manage it for you.

What the camera refuses

The visual style of Pialat’s films — if style is the right word for something that works by apparent refusal of style — is the direct expression of his moral position. He uses natural light wherever possible. He shoots on location rather than in constructed sets. He uses long takes not to create a particular aesthetic effect but because cutting would allow the audience to reset emotionally between moments, and Pialat does not want them to reset. He wants the accumulation of discomfort to build until it becomes something else — not catharsis, which implies release, but understanding, which implies a change in the way you see.

His camera does not comment. This is perhaps the most radical thing about it. The conventional film camera is a remarkably opinionated instrument: through its positioning, its movement, its relationship to the editing that surrounds it, it tells the audience constantly what to attend to, what to feel, how to evaluate what they are seeing. Pialat’s camera withholds these instructions. It places you in a room and leaves you there, and what you make of what you see is your own responsibility. This requires more of an audience than most audiences are accustomed to giving, and it accounts for the resistance his films sometimes encounter on first viewing — the sense that nothing is happening, that the film is not doing its job, when in fact the film is doing a job so demanding that it takes time to recognise it as a job at all.

The comparison with painting is not incidental — Pialat was a serious painter before he was a filmmaker, and returned to painting in the last years of his life, and the relationship between the two practices runs through his visual sensibility in ways that are easier to feel than to describe. There is a quality of attention in his cinematography that is closer to the sustained contemplation of a canvas than to the kinetic forward movement of conventional cinema — a quality of looking that is both patient and merciless, that does not let the image go until it has given up everything it has to give.

The inheritance

The line of descent from Pialat in French cinema is direct and acknowledged. Arnaud Desplechin, whose films about family and love and intellectual life carry a similar commitment to unresolved emotional complexity, has spoken at length about what Pialat made possible. Bruno Dumont, whose films about violence and grace in the landscapes of northern France push Pialat’s austerity to a further extreme, is unthinkable without his example. Claire Denis, perhaps the most important French filmmaker of her generation, shares with Pialat the quality of physical specificity — the sense that bodies in space tell the truth that faces and dialogue obscure — and has acknowledged the debt. The tradition he established, of a French cinema rooted in the physical and the unresolved, in the body rather than the idea, in behaviour rather than psychology, is one of the most vital in contemporary European film, and it begins, in its modern form, with Pialat.

But the influence extends further than France, and further than direct citation. Pialat belongs to a small group of filmmakers — Cassavetes is the other essential member, and Fassbinder completes the trinity this cluster has assembled — who changed the threshold of honesty that serious cinema holds itself to. Before them, it was possible to make films about love and suffering and human relationships that were genuinely good films without achieving the kind of emotional truth that they demonstrated was available. After them, the comfortable version of that territory is harder to inhabit without a sense of what has been left out, what has been smoothed over, what courage has been declined. They raised the stakes permanently, and the raising was a gift, even if — especially if — it was a gift that made everything harder.

What remains

Pialat died in 2003, having made nine features across thirty-five years, and the smallness of the number is the measure of his seriousness. He did not make films to fill time or fulfil contracts or maintain a career. He made them when he had something that required making, and when the making was complete he stopped. The films that resulted are among the most honest documents of human intimate life that cinema has produced — honest in a way that is genuinely uncomfortable, that does not offer the usual exits, that asks you to sit with the full weight of what you are being shown without the protective structures that narrative normally provides.

À nos amours remains the best place to begin. Watch Sandrine Bonnaire in that film — she was fifteen, it was her first film, and she gives a performance of such complete and undefended truth that the question of whether it is acting or simply being becomes genuinely unanswerable. Watch the scenes with Pialat himself as her father — the love between them that is real and broken and irreparable all at once. Watch the film’s final scene, which resolves nothing and leaves you with everything, and ask yourself when cinema last asked that much of you and gave that much back.

The answer, if you have been following this series, will be recently. That is the point. This is a tradition, not a collection of isolated geniuses. Cassavetes made it possible. Pialat proved it was possible in another language, in another country, in another sensibility entirely. The conversation between them, conducted across the Atlantic without either of them ever needing to acknowledge it directly, is one of the most important conversations in the history of the art form, and it is not over.

Sources and further reading

Jacques Philippon, Maurice Pialat (1992) — the most substantial critical study available in French, essential for anyone who reads the language and wants to go deep into the films.

Kent Jones, Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism (2007) — contains the finest essay on Pialat in English, by the American critic who has done most to bring his work to Anglophone attention.

Geoff Andrew, Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema (1998) — places Pialat in the international context of independent cinema in ways that illuminate both his distinctiveness and his connections.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema (2004) — includes a valuable account of Pialat’s place in world cinema by one of the few American critics to have followed his work consistently from the beginning.

For first-time viewers, the suggested order: À nos amours (1983) first, for Bonnaire and for the clearest statement of his central subject. Then Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), which is bleaker and more sustained. Then Van Gogh (1991), his most formally ambitious film and the one that shows what his painterly sensibility looks like when applied directly to a painter’s life. Sous le soleil de Satan (1987) for those who want to follow him into the explicitly spiritual territory he shared, across very different aesthetic means, with Bresson.