Moi, Pierre Rivière... (1976)

Moi, Pierre Rivière... is a French crime film first released in 1976, directed by René Allio.  The film stars Claude Hébert, Jacqueline Millière, Joseph Leportier, Annick Géhan and Nicole Géhan.  It has also been released under the title: I Pierre Riviere.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


The third of June 1835 was an eventful day in the life of the twenty-year old Normandy peasant Pierre Rivière.   On this day, he chose to slit the throats of his mother, his sister and his younger brother with a hand scythe.  Afterwards, he ran away and spent the next few weeks wandering about in the woods until he was arrested.   In their evidence for the king’s procurer, the local people describe Pierre as a friendless simpleton who has always behaved strangely.  Yet during his incarceration Pierre gives an account of his actions that reveals a lucid intellect and a sensitive nature.  He explains that he was driven to kill his mother because she was driving his father, whom he loved dearly, to ruin.  Ever since he can remember, Pierre has harboured nothing but hatred for his mother, who continually made life miserable for his father.  Eventually, he made up his mind to sacrifice himself so that his father could be spared further suffering.  How will Pierre be judged - a monstrous criminal or a madman?  Whatever happens, Pierre is resigned to his fate...

Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère... is one of the most haunting and thoughtfully composed French films of the 1970s, a work of almost unparallelled cinematic veracity with its extremely naturalistic account of a horrific crime that was a cause célèbre in 1830s France.  The film is closely based on a book of the same title, published in 1973, by the eminent philosopher Michel Foucault.  As in Foucault’s book, it presents the events leading up to a gruesome triple murder through firsthand testimony provided by the killer himself, 20-year-old Pierre Rivière, and his neighbours in the Normandy village where the crime took place.  Director René Allio adopts the same hyper-realist approach that he had employed, albeit less successfully, on his earlier historical drama Les Camisards (1972), using real locations and a restrained style of mise-en-scène (characterised by long takes and minimal movement by the actors) that makes every shot appear as though it was taken from real life. Most of the cast is made up of non-professional actors, recruited from the village where the film was recorded. 

Stripped of such cinematic embellishments as music and artificial lighting, Moi, Pierre Rivière... possesses a raw documentary feel and bleak poetry that brings a startling reality to what it shows, making it a film that is gruelling to watch and yet also intensely emotionally involving.   The film’s austere presentation and unremitting melancholic tone are evocative of Robert Bresson’s films, notably Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962) and Mouchette (1967) which offer similarly stark portraits of an outsider being brutalised and destroyed by an unfeeling world.  Allio collaborated on the screenplay with two critics on the influential film journal Les Cahiers du cinéma - Pascal Bonitzer, who would later become an acclaimed screenwriter and director, and Serge Toubiana, the future director of the Cinémathèque française.  Allio’s assistant director on the film was Nicolas Philibert, who would later emerge as one of France’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, best known for his arresting tribute to primary school education, Être et avoir (2002).  In his documentary Retour en Normandie (2007), Philibert paid homage to Allio’s film by revisiting the Normandy village where it was filmed and catching up with the cast members, many of whom still had very strong views on the subject of the film.  

Moi, Pierre Rivière... is not a film for the squeamish.  Oddly, it is not the brutal murders that shock, even when these are shown in sufficient graphic detail to make you flinch in disgust, but rather the incredible human ordeal that preceded it, as recounted by the disturbed young man who committed the evil deed.  Ostracised from the community to which he belonged, no doubt on account of his latent mental illness, and traumatised by the unrelenting cruelty that his mother meted out to his father, Pierre Rivière is portrayed less as a monster and more as a martyr, his crime shown to be the inevitable consequence of the social conditions of his time.  The film opens with the scene of the carnage, a blood stained hovel in which three human lives ended in sudden brutal savagery.  Nothing, we tell ourselves, could excuse this slaughter.  The perpetrator must be evil, must be made to pay for what he has done.  It is only when the withdrawn Pierre Rivière sits down at his table in his prison cell and begins to tell us his story, with simple yet potent eloquence, that our feelings change.  The killings were merely the final chapter in a saga of malice and suffering that had gone on for twenty years.  Pierre does not set out to excuse himself from his crime but merely to explain how he was impelled, by instincts he could not control, to murder his mother, his sister and his little brother one day in June 1835.  Today, there is no question that Pierre would be diagnosed as mentally ill, but at the time of his crime his condition (sociopathy or schizophrenia) was unknown and he was therefore judged to be responsible for his actions - this is the real tragedy of his story.  Pierre Rivière’s case is historically significant in that it was the first instance in which psychiatric evidence was heard in a court of law, a significant milestone in the development of modern jurisprudence.

What makes the film so particularly poignant and memorable is Claude Hébert’s harrowingly authentic portrayal of the tormented Pierre Rivière.  In common with all of the actors who played the villagers in the film, Hébert was a non-professional with no prior acting experience, yet he gives a performance (indeed a non-performance, since Hébert seems to live rather than act his part) that no trained actor could ever hope to emulate.  There is an angelic gentleness and innocence to Hébert’s screen persona which is completely at odds with the crime that has been committed.  We even find it hard to accept his admission that he derives pleasure in torturing frogs and birds.  Yet, in just a few shots, the camera manages to show us the monster that lurks beneath the surface.  Fleetingly, we glimpse a spine-chilling inhumanity in his expression, a desolate coldness in his penetrating eyes.  Pierre is possessed by evil, but he himself is not evil.  However despicable the acts that he has committed, our sympathies remain with him, with this sad wretch afflicted with an illness which no one recognises as such and a compassion for his father that will drive him to an act of self-sacrificing desperation.  Such is the power of Hébert’s unselfconscious and deeply introspective interpretation of Pierre that we cannot help but sympathise with him and loathe the circumstances that led to his tragic coup de tête.  After this film, Hébert enjoyed a short but successful career as an actor, notably taking the lead in Jacques Doillon’s La Drôlesse (1979), but he gave up acting in the early 1980s to become a priest and ended up working amongst the destitute of Haiti. 

Despite some generally positive reviews, Moi, Pierre Rivière... was not a commercial success when it was first released.  It has remained overlooked, if not completely forgotten, for thirty years, until Nicholas Philibert released his revealing documentary about the film in 2007.  Thanks to Philibert’s efforts, Moi, Pierre Rivière... has come back into circulation and is enjoying a long overdue reappraisal.  The film is not only worth watching for the remarkable story it relates and the devastatingly humane way in which it tells it, but also because it is soberingly relevant for our times.  It cautions us against rushing to judgement when some atrocity is committed and makes us aware that not all crimes are perpetrated by evil individuals who are responsible for their actions.  Unfavourable social factors and mental illness can often lie behind what look like acts of senseless barbarity, and we risk becoming barbarians ourselves if we fail to recognise this and merely ascribe evil intent to all crimes.   Moi, Pierre Rivière... is not only a superlative piece of cinema, it is also a valuable social document from which we can all learn something.

© James Travers 2011

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