La Pirate (1984) - film review

Shortly after returning home one evening with her husband, Alma is visited by her one-time lesbian lover Carole.  In the ensuing emotional torrent, Alma allows herself to be abducted by Carole and taken to a hotel, pursued by a young girl – an unnamed friend of Carole – and an eccentric bystander posing as a private detective.  Before Alma and Carole can resolve their situation, Alma’s husband Andrew appears on the scene and, in a mad frenzy, attempts to reclaim his wife…

French director Jacques Doillon is no stranger to controversy and in La Pirate, arguably his most provocative work, he assaults our sensibilities with this puzzling and harrowing portrayal of searing naked emotion.  The film revolves around five disparate characters about whom we know nothing and with whom we are compelled to have little in the way of sympathy.  It is a daring work which boldly tests the limits of what is acceptable in film drama.  How much does an author have to reveal about his characters for us to believe in their situation, to feel involved in the story we see unfolding before our eyes?  Doillon certainly doesn’t go out of his way to make it easy for his audience.  The film starts with a jolt and then accelerates relentlessly towards its bleak dramatic ending with little if anything in the way of exposition.

The impression is that you have joined the film somewhere near the end of the story, that the greater part of the action has already taken place. What we are seeing is the denouement of an epic human saga, the endgame to a torrid tale that we scarcely dare to speculate on.  For that reason, the film depends greatly on its spectator’s willingness to participate, to fill in the gaps and imagine the past experiences of the five characters in the film.  Without this involvement, the film really cannot function – everything feels random, irrational, unrealistic, an odd self-indulgent game in histrionic excess.   That Doillon is perhaps placing too great a demand on his audience could explain the hostile reaction the film aroused when it was first released, particularly at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984.  Unless the spectator is prepared to work to make sense of the film, it is a wasted effort, and the extraordinarily tortured performances (notably from Jane Birkin and Maruschka Detmers) are cruelly negated.

© James Travers 2004

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